Scientists were experimenting with lycopene, a substance that protects tomatoes from the sun.
Due to their short lifetime, solar panels cannot compete in the market. Still, scientists have not stopped looking for new ways to increase the stability, durability and efficiency of batteries, writes interestingengineering.com.
Chinese scientists used lycopene, also called “tomato pigment”. Lycopene is a natural antioxidant. It inhibits a chemical process such as oxidation as a result of stabilizing free radicals. Let’s take an example of how lycopene protects tomatoes. Free radicals are ions, atoms or molecules with an odd number of electrons that make them unstable and can damage cells in living organisms by activating reactions that affect changes in the DNA chain as a result. Thus, combining the free radicals produced by the Sun’s ultraviolet radiation, lycopene makes them more stable. Thus, the pigment protects tomatoes and other red-colored vegetables and fruits from ultraviolet rays, reducing damage to skin cells.
The researchers say tomato pigment could be the key to making solar cells more efficient. They hypothesized that lycopene could reduce the degradation of UV-generated perovskite solar panels and increase their lifetime. After practical testing, they found that lycopene passivates the interface between crystallites in polycrystalline materials, thereby improving crystallinity and transparency, and reducing the density of electron traps. Overall, this improves the electrical flow in solar cell polycrystals, increasing their efficiency.
But this isn’t the first time scientists have improved the efficiency of perovskite solar panels. In April 2021, a team from the City University of Hong Kong added ferrocene, an iron-based organometallic compound first produced at Duken University in 1951, to perovskite solar cells, increasing their efficiency by up to 25%.
In September of that year, researchers in the Netherlands created a perovskite-silicon device that uses a mix of silicon solar cells and perovskite solar cells to extract energy from the visible light and infrared spectrum (via silicon solar cells) plus the ultraviolet spectrum. perovskite solar cells). The device achieved an efficiency of 30.1%.
We previously reported that there is a way to compete solar energy with fossil fuels used in power plants.
Source: Focus
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