NSF Engineering Research Center for Quantum Energy and Sustainable Solar Technologies: QESST

NSF 量子能源和可持续太阳能技术工程研究中心：QESST

• 批准号: 1041895
• 负责人: Christiana Honsberg
• 金额: $ 1850万
• 依托单位: Arizona State University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Cooperative Agreement
• 财政年份: 2011
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2011-08-15 至 2022-07-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1041895&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: NSF; Engineering; Research; Center; Quantum

A major societal challenge is to generate terawatts (TWs) of electricity with minimal environmental impact. The Quantum Energy and Sustainable Solar Technologies (QESST) ERC will transform the existing electricity generation system towards a sustainable and ubiquitous one by developing photovoltaic (PV) technologies with higher efficiency and novel functionality. QESST will meet the TW challenge by enabling a large, sustained growth rate of photovoltaic (PV) electricity generation by circumventing the trade-off between efficiency increases and cost decreases, allowing PV devices that are scalable to commercial production and which provide a route for continuous improvements in performance and affordability. The first thrust supporting this goal directly addresses the energy generation system itself through development of technologies and policies which will allow the scale-up of novel PV devices into large-scale manufacturing, enabling the PV industry to rapidly reach TW levels of energy production. QESST's second thrust seeks to charter a "Moore's Law" for photovoltaics via breakthrough improvements in solar cell efficiencies to ultimately realize structures with dramatically higher energy generation per unit volume of material, a primary parameter driving cost reduction. Finally,the third thrust augments the other two by means of fundamental research directed towards realizing the theoretical thermodynamic limit of solar-to-electric conversion (~85%) through a variety of state-of-the-art approaches which overcome the limitations of single bandgap solar cells (~32%). These involve advances in basic material science and defect control, photonics and light trapping, energy conversion science, and advanced nanofabrication and characterization techniques.

一个主要的社会挑战是以最小的环境影响产生太瓦（TW）的电力。量子能源和可持续太阳能技术（QESST）ERC将通过开发具有更高效率和新功能的光伏（PV）技术，将现有的发电系统转变为可持续和无处不在的发电系统。QESST将通过规避效率提高和成本降低之间的权衡来实现光伏（PV）发电的大规模持续增长率，从而满足TW挑战，允许可扩展到商业生产的PV设备，并为性能和可负担性的持续改进提供途径。支持这一目标的第一个推动力是通过技术和政策的发展直接解决发电系统本身的问题，这将使新型光伏器件的规模扩大到大规模制造，使光伏行业能够迅速达到TW的能源生产水平。QESST的第二个目标是通过突破性地提高太阳能电池的效率，为光伏发电制定“摩尔定律”，最终实现每单位体积材料产生更高能量的结构，这是降低成本的主要参数。最后，第三个推力通过基础研究来增强其他两个推力，这些基础研究旨在通过各种最先进的方法来实现太阳能到电力转换的理论热力学极限（~85%），这些方法克服了单带隙太阳能电池的限制（~32%）。这些涉及基础材料科学和缺陷控制，光子学和光捕获，能量转换科学以及先进的纳米纤维和表征技术的进步。