what is missing tells the real story, page-2

Thanks Triage.

No real drama with the moderated posts .Just sometimes "like minded" individuals on HC wish to discuss a topic in a less restrictive forum than HC can provide .

Dyesol technology will be grid competitive ,and not only that ,DSSC will be refined for many years to come.
It is a technology in its infancy ,and Sylvia Tulloch believes that DSSC can achieve 15% efficiency by 2015 .

Remembering that DSSC generates electricity for a longer time during sunlight hours than conventional solar technology ,so efficiency % levels are really misleading compared to total electricity generated in a year .DSSC with the same efficiency rating as its silicon competitor will generate significantly more power over a 12 month period .




This is part of an interview theat Sylvia Tulloch gave last year to "Beyond Zero Emmissions "

This supports my view that DSSC has much more potential for development and refinement on an already exceptional technology .




Matthew: OK, that's pretty impressive. Are there any known upper limits of where you'll get to, like is that sort of 20% ceiling or...?

Sylvia: No, there isn't because well up to 100% of course. It's a matter of capturing that light, so there is no limit. See, there is a limit in first and second generation because you have photons of light. It takes a certain amount of energy to knock off an electron. If you have less than that, it doesn't work, and if you have more than that, it's wasted. And, so you can actually do a graph of the energy of all those photons that are coming down from the sun and we know that there's only about 30% of that energy can be taken up by a Silicon solar cell, first and second generation.

But it's not like that with a dye solar cell because the dye is absorbing the spectrum, so provided you can actually get the dye's lined up and a single dye won't do it, but there are various things about mixing dyes and having levels of dyes, so that theoretically you can then capture the whole part of the spectrum.

Matthew: Now, I'm no expert on photosynthesis or photoelectric conversion but what I was wondering was we had Mark Wanlass from the National Renewable Energy Laboratories and he does multi-junction conventional photovoltaics. So, he puts three layers together and I was wondering if there's any way of adding the dye solar layer as well to increase the conversion efficiency or would it not work?

Sylvia: Well, we've done two layer, dye solar cells. That's one of the ways of having multi layers of dyes. So, what you would do there for example is have one red dye, and that's absorbing the yellow and blue part of spectrum, and underneath that you have a green dye that's absorbing all the red part of the spectrum. And then theoretically, you would then, we haven't done this yet, but you could also... there are dyes that absorb in the infra-red and... so that you'd have another dye thats absorbing the infra-red. So, that stacking system is how you can move closer towards 100% theoretically;