Energy & Green Tech
So far, solar cells based on polycrystalline cadmium selenide telluride (CdSeTe) have exhibited some crucial limitations, despite their low fabrication costs and advantageous qualities. Most notably, these solar cells exhibit ...
Electronics & Semiconductors
Color centers are atomic imperfections in crystalline solids that absorb visible light of a particular color or radiation. These defects, typically in the form of missing atoms or substitutional impurities, can produce a ...
Electronics & Semiconductors
When it comes to the future of solar energy cells, say farewell to silicon, and hello to calcium titanium oxide—the compound mineral better known as perovskite.
Aug 3, 2020
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92
Engineering
Applying just a bit of strain to a piece of semiconductor or other crystalline material can deform the orderly arrangement of atoms in its structure enough to cause dramatic changes in its properties, such as the way it conducts ...
Feb 11, 2019
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60
Energy & Green Tech
Researchers have shown that defects in the molecular structure of perovskites - a material which could revolutionise the solar cell industry - can be "healed" by exposing it to light and just the right amount of humidity.
Sep 6, 2017
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53
Electronics & Semiconductors
Researchers at Linköping University, Sweden, have developed a digital display screen where the LEDs themselves react to touch, light, fingerprints and the user's pulse, among other things. Their results, published in Nature ...
Apr 10, 2024
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40
Engineering
Solar power has become indispensable in our global pursuit of clean energy and sustainability. Today, about 95% of solar cells are made using crystalline silicon (c-Si). Most commercial designs employ a c-Si photoactive layer ...
Sep 27, 2023
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65
Energy & Green Tech
Researchers from the Qingdao Institute of Bioenergy and Bioprocess Technology (QIBEBT) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) have tweaked the material of ternary organic solar cells (TOSCs) and achieved efficiencies in ...
Sep 4, 2023
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79
Electronics & Semiconductors
Researchers have created a robot capable of conducting experiments more efficiently and sustainably to develop a range of new semiconductor materials with desirable attributes. The researchers have already demonstrated that ...
Jul 25, 2023
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79
Energy & Green Tech
Solar energy is the cheapest and most accessible form of energy. Now, it promises to be more efficient than ever. Scientists from a Chinese solar technology company have developed a new type of solar cell that could be a ...
May 9, 2023
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108
Crystallinity refers to the degree of structural order in a solid. In a crystal, the atoms or molecules are arranged in a regular, periodic manner. The degree of crystallinity has a big influence on hardness, density, transparency and diffusion. In a gas, the relative positions of the atoms or molecules are completely random. Amorphous materials, such as liquids and glasses, represent an intermediate case, having order over short distances (a few atomic or molecular spacings) but not over longer distances.
Many materials (such as glass-ceramics and some polymers), can be prepared in such a way as to produce a mixture of crystalline and amorphous regions. In such cases, crystallinity is usually specified as a percentage of the volume of the material that is crystalline. Even within materials that are completely crystalline, however, the degree of structural perfection can vary. For instance, most metallic alloys are crystalline, but they usually comprise many independent crystalline regions (grains or crystallites) in various orientations separated by grain boundaries; furthermore, they contain other defects (notably dislocations) that reduce the degree of structural perfection. The most highly perfect crystals are silicon boules produced for semiconductor electronics; these are large single crystals (so they have no grain boundaries), are nearly free of dislocations, and have precisely controlled concentrations of defect atoms.
Crystallinity can be measured using x-ray diffraction, but calorimetric techniques are also commonly used.
This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA
