Buckyballs improve solar yield:
This was originally developed by Texas Instruments in the mid 1980's ... aside for endless promises of being the next break thru (almost always to get some grant or other funding monies), nothing has become of it. Texas Instruments gave up and sold off the technology ... if TI couldn't make it work, I doubt some new "research lab" is going to have Sharp,BP and other shaking in there boots
If you read between the lines on the latest PR , its coming from the New Mexico State University , which no doubt is looking for refill of troughs($$$) for there "break thru" research
Heres the real clincher and I quote:
" The development is an outgrowth of the collaborative's work developing high-tech coatings for military aircraft, a program supported by Sens. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., and Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., Curran said."
I think you're confusing the buckyball technology with TI's spheral solar cells, which were made from spheres of silicon that were enormous compared to a buckyball. The spheral technology is now owned by a company in Canada that is trying to either develop it or sell it. It's not going anywhere, IMO.
Both the stories here are about plastic solar cells that are very different from TI's cells. These actually have a lot of potential, but it will likely be a decade or two before anything like this makes a dent in the commercial PV market. I don't believe their "five years" timeline for an instant.
I don't think it's the buckyballs increasing the efficiency -- non-buckyball organic PV efficiencies in the neighborhood of 5% have also been reported. Rather, I think they're tinkering with the way they form the electronic junction between the two plastic layers that form the cell in order to minimize the distance that the electrons have to travel to reach it. This is critically important because if they don't reach the junction, they can't participate in the flow of current. I'm oversimplifying quite a bit, but I suspect that's the essence of what they're doing.
I wouldn't exactly call it a breakthrough, but these days that word has been cheapened to the point that it's only useful for recognizing when someone has nothing to say.
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