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.

一个重大的社会挑战是产生电力（TWS）的电力，而环境影响很小。量子能和可持续太阳能技术（QESST）ERC将通过开发具有较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技术。 Qesst将通过规避效率提高和成本降低之间的权衡取舍，从而实现较大的，持续的光伏（PV）发电的增长速度，从而应对TW挑战，从而使PV设备可扩展到商业生产，并为绩效和负担能力的持续提高提供途径。支持这一目标的第一个推力直接通过制定技术和政策来解决能源产生系统本身，这将使新型的PV设备扩大到大规模制造中，从而使PV行业能够迅速达到TW能源生产水平。 Qesst的第二个推力旨在通过太阳能电池效率的突破性提高来宪章，以将光伏的“摩尔定律”宪章，以最终实现每单位材料的能量产生较高的能量，这是主要参数驱动成本降低。最后，第三个推力通过旨在实现太阳能转换的理论热力学极限（〜85％）的基础研究来增强另外两种，从而通过各种最先进的方法来克服单个带gap太阳能电池的局限性（〜32％）。这些涉及基本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化和表征技术的进步。