Dye-based organic PVs could remove need for batteries

The technology is designed to be used indoors in consumer electronic devices such as wireless keyboards, foregoing the need for batteries.

For this reason, the company says standard test conditions used to obtain efficiency measures — generally an irradiance of 1,000W/m² with an air mass at 1.5 spectrum and cell temperature of 25ºC — are simply not suitable.

‘If you’ve got a device that works at very high light levels with a high efficiency, but doesn’t then carry that efficiency down to the lower light levels, it isn’t going to work as well as you think it is,’ said G24i technology officer Mark Spratt.

Unlike silicon PVs and solid organic semiconductor PVs, dye-based solar cells use nanoparticles in electrolyte suspensions. G24i has recently developed a new composition of dye and electrolyte to achieve a conversion efficiency of 26 per cent — a claimed improvement on the previous record for this type of cell, which stood at 15 per cent.