Imperial Collage spin-out QuantaSol is claiming a single-junction solar cell world record
The strain-balanced quantum-well solar cell recorded an efficiency of 28.3% when exposed to 500sun concentrated illumination.
"Our technology is the industry's best kept secret. This is the first time that anyone has successfully combined high efficiency with ease of manufacture, historically a bug-bear of the solar cell industry," said Kevin Arthur, QuantaSol's CEO. "We're now gearing up to provide multi-junction cells of even higher efficiencies as early as Q1 2010."
Based in Kingston-upon-Thames, Surrey, the firm has developed the cell in two years and had its results confirmed by German lab Fraunhofer ISE.
See also: Electronics Weekly focus on solar cells
The cell "combines several nanostructures, of two or more different alloys, in order to obtain synthetic crystals that overcome the problems associated with current solar cell designs," claimed QuantaSol, which completed a £2m second funding round last week.
These problems, said the firm, are achieving a bandgap that matches the sun's spectrum, at the same time as a lattice spacing that matches commercially available substrates - gallium arsenide or germanium - and use commercially viable crystal-growth technologies.
"None of the known semiconductor compounds or alloys can meet all these conditions at the same time," said QuantaSol.