2010/2/14 Terry Blanton <[email protected]>: > With a printable cell which does not use tellurium nor indium: > > http://www.physorg.com/news185093054.html
Only at the sample stage, and "printed" in pure nitrogen rather than air, but nice! They had the good idea to make the technical paper freely accessible: http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/123276375/PDFSTART?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0 Quote: <<Chalcogenide-based solar cells provide a critical pathway to cost parity between photovoltaic (PV) and conventional energy sources. Currently, only Cu(In,Ga)(S,Se)2 (CIGS) and CdTe technologies have reached commercial module production with stable power conversion efficiencies of over 9 percent.[1,2] Despite the promise of these technologies, restrictions on heavy metal usage for Cd and limitations in supply for In and Te are projected to restrict the production capacity of the existing chalcogen-based technologies to <100GWp per year, a small fraction of our growing energy needs, which are expected to double to 27TW by 2050.[3–5] Earth-abundant copper-zinc-tin-chalcogenide kesterites, Cu2ZnSnS4 and Cu2ZnSnSe4, have been examined as potential alternatives for the two leading technologies,[6–9] reaching promising but not yet marketable efficiencies of 6.7% and 3.2%, respectively, by multilayer vacuum deposition.[7,8]Here we show a non-vacuum, slurry-based coating method that combines advantages of both solution processing[10–13] and particlebased deposition,[14–17] enabling fabrication of Cu2ZnSn(Se,S)4 devices with over 9.6% efficiency—a factor of five performance improvement relative to previous attempts to use highthroughput ink-based approaches[16–18] and >40% higher than previous record devices prepared using vacuum-based methods.[7]>>
