Professor Du Xiwen’s research team at the School of Materials Science and Engineering of Tianjin University published a paper about high efficiency light trapping structure solar cells named "CdS Nanoflake Arrays for Highly Efficient Light Trapping" in Advanced Materials, a top journal in the field of materials. Also, this paper was selected as the cover story.

High efficiency light harvesting is one of the key factors affecting the conversion efficiency of solar cells. Due to a randomly directed scattering effect at the surface of nanostructured solar cells, the loss of incident light is inevitable. As a result, Prof. Du’s team conducted a series of studies to manage the light within the solar cell for a much higher light harvesting efficiency, such as a sponge-like structure and an inverse opal structure. Recently, they have also developed a highly efficient light trapping nanoflake array structure.

The Cd nanoflake arrays were first obtained by the PVD method. Then, by further vulcanization process CdS semiconductor nanoflake arrays were successfully prepared. Thanks to the larger size of the flakes and regular configuration, the light could be trapped within cavities enclosed by nanoflakes. As a result, the light absorption efficiency of the device can be enhanced up to a high level (95%). What’s more, the nanoflake arrays can also serve as a functional scaffold to help the thin organic material coating achieve a high light absorption of up to 95%, thereby overcoming the mismatch between the effective absorption depth of the organic material and its short exciton diffusion length. The hybrid solar cell composited of P3HT thin film coated NFAs can yield a 10-fold higher photocurrent than planar HSCs owing to their outstanding light harvesting. The above studies have been published in Advanced Materials, Advanced Functional Materials, and Advanced Materials Interfaces in 2014.

Prof. Du’s research team has carried out a series of work about quantum dot synthesis via a laser method and application of solar energy, of which some excellent works have been published in Nature Communications, JACS, Angew. Chem. Int. Ed., and Adv. Mater. The work about laser controlled synthesis of nanostructures has been chosen as the study highlight by Nature China, while the new sponge-like structure of a solar cell was chosen as the cover paper of J. Mater. Chem.