Research

United States=based solid-state battery developer ION announced it has achieved 800 cycles with its battery, marking significant progress towards commercialisation. If this trend continues, the development holds promising potential for grid-scale projects.

Researchers at Queensland’s James Cook University have developed a process to synthesise graphene from tangerine peel oil, which they then used to recover silver from waste PV material.

A team of researchers in Western Australia has outlined a new methodology to determine the minimum power rating of energy storage systems used for emergency under-frequency response. The ESS size must be calculated to maintain the frequency within the standard operating range.

Scientists in Europe have created an after-market cooling solution that can be fitted to existing standard PV modules. The system is based on a water chamber placed at the backside of the module and can reportedly provide a net electrical energy gain of more than 9%.

A team of researchers from the University of New South Wales is confident it can get silicon solar cells to a power conversion efficiency above 30% by integrating a process that splits particles of light, or photons, into two smaller energy chunks.

Researchers in Malaysia have proposed a new approach to identify the optimal power sizing ratio to balance PV energy capture with inverter costs. The calibrated model is said to accurately reflect the relationship between inverter efficiency and real-world system behavior.

As bifacial modules proliferate, estimations of albedo are becoming more important and with developers not prepared to install weather stations to assess solar resource, a popular option has become third-party, on-site measurements over periods as short as a day. Is this an acceptable compromise between costly on-site measuring and less accurate satellite data? Everoze’s Stefan Mau discusses the potential benefits and limitations of this approach.

A new report published by the CSIRO says Australia’s research into solar recycling is second in the world, outside China, but suggests the establishment of mid-stream activities such as the production of metallurgical silicon and polysilicon have big potential.

Larger wafer and module sizes have had a profound influence on module power output in recent years but standardisation appears to have taken hold, with no further increases evident in module data, according to Molly Morgan, a senior research analyst at Exawatt, which is now part of the CRU Group.

A German research team is conducting practical tests to see how solar modules with integrated radio technology can be linked to form an overall network. The “communicative” panels should represent a simple and cost-effective solution for monitoring and controlling small-scale photovoltaic systems.