TOSHIBA

The company has technology to add up to 35 km of daily mileage to electric vehicles without the need to connect to the network to charge

Toshiba's development promises to add up to 35 km of daily mileage to electric vehicles “for free”, to produce electric vehicles without the need to connect to the grid to charge batteries, and will also allow the implementation of projects for stratospheric telecommunications platforms. All of this is due to an increase in the efficiency of solar panels and, most importantly, without a significant increase in the cost of photographic panels.

The company intends to achieve its stated goals by producing tandem (composite) solar cells, whose top transparent layer is made of cheap copper oxide (Cu2O), and the bottom is made of ordinary silicon. Toshiba unveiled the first promising prototype of this tandem cell in 2019, which we talked about once. In the future, a composite photocell using the company's technology could be up to 40% efficient. And that's taking into account the fact that you don't need expensive chemical elements from groups III-V on the periodic table, including gallium arsenide. It will be much cheaper to use copper.

Introduced in 2019, Toshiba's tandem solar cell boasted an efficiency of 23.8%, while the typical efficiency of conventional silicon solar cells was 22%. The further improvement of the technology for manufacturing a transparent layer made it possible to increase its efficiency to 8.4%, and the overall efficiency together with silicon – to 27.4%. In comparison, the most efficient silicon solar cell to date shows an efficiency of 26.7%, which is significantly lower than Toshiba's tandem photocell.

The company will continue to improve the technology of applying a top layer that is transparent to silicon so that each layer effectively absorbs its own wavelength, while the top layer remains as transparent as possible. The developers' goal is to achieve transparent layer efficiency at the 10% level while maintaining 80% transparency, and then electrical transport will be aided in the form of hinged panels and will be less dependent on battery charge. 

Image source: Toshiba