Record-setting solar cell team to work with DuPont

The University, already considered an important center for renewable-energy research, has reached a milestone in solar cell efficiency and has launched a partnership with the DuPont Co.

Using a novel technology that adds multiple innovations to a very high-performance crystalline silicon solar cell platform, a UD-led consortium recently achieved a record-breaking combined solar cell efficiency of 42.8 percent from sunlight at standard terrestrial conditions.

That number is a significant advance from the previous record of 40.7 percent announced in December and demonstrates an important milestone on the path to the 50 percent efficiency goal set by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). In November 2005, the UD-led consortium received about $13 million in funding for the initial phases of the DARPA Very High Efficiency Solar Cell (VHESC) program to develop affordable portable solar cell battery chargers.

Combined with the demonstrated efficiency performance of the very high efficiency solar cells’ spectral splitting optics, which is more than 93 percent, these recent results put the pieces in place for a solar cell module with a net efficiency 30 percent greater than any previous module efficiency and twice the efficiency of state-of-the-art silicon solar cell modules.

As a result of the consortium’s technical performance, DARPA is initiating the next phase of the program by funding the newly formed DuPont-University of Delaware VHESC Consortium to transition the lab-scale work to an engineering and manufacturing prototype model. This three-year effort could be worth as much as $100 million, including industry cost-share.

The ground-breaking research was led by Allen Barnett, principal investigator and UD professor of electrical and computer engineering, and Christiana Honsberg, co-principal investigator and associate professor of electrical and computer engineering. The two direct the University’s High Performance Solar Power Program.

The consortium’s goal is to create solar cells that operate at 50 percent in production, according to Barnett. With the fresh funding and cooperative efforts of the DuPont-UD consortium, he says, it is expected that new high efficiency solar cells could be in production by 2010.