Review for Emerging Photovoltaic Devices for Specialty Applications

    2020/08/20
Emerging Photovoltaic Devices for Specialty Applications
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  • Emerging Photovoltaic Devices for Specialty Applications

Emerging solar cells, including dye-sensitized solar cells, organic solar cells, and perovskite solar cells, are receiving increasing attention recently because they can provide efficient solar power supply at low cost. On the other hand, these photovoltaic devices are also very useful for specialty applications. Because they all feature tunable band structures, which can be modified through molecular design and/or altered compositions, the properties of emerging photovoltaic devices can be tailored to fit the special requirements of a particular application. For instance, the absorption spectra can be fitted to the emission spectrum of an artificial light source (e.g., fluorescence lamp; white light-emitting diode), thereby efficiently converting the indoor lighting to electricity. Further, because there exists a near-infrared window in which photons can penetrate deeply into tissues, the absorption bands of these photovoltaic devices can be tailored specially to this therapeutic window to harvest tissue-penetrating light, thereby wirelessly providing power to biomedical devices positioned beneath the skin. Prof. Fang-Chung Chen from Department of Photonics, National Chiao Tung University publishes a review article about the progress of these emerging photovoltaic devices for specialty applications. This review has been recognized as “Top Downloaded Paper 2018-2019” in Advanced Optical Materials.