UT Arlington team develops new storage cell for solar energy storage, nighttime conversion
http://www.uta.edu/news/releases/2015/06/Fuqiang-Liu-solar-cell.php[font face=Serif][font size=5]UT Arlington team develops new storage cell for solar energy storage, nighttime conversion[/font]
Tuesday, June 30, 2015
[font size=3]A University of Texas at Arlington materials science and engineering team has developed a new energy cell that can store large-scale solar energy even when its dark.
The innovation is an advancement over the most common solar energy systems that rely on using sunlight immediately as a power source. Those systems are hindered by not being able to use that solar energy at night or when cloudy conditions exist.
The UT Arlington team developed an all-vanadium photo-electrochemical flow cell that allows for efficient and large-scale solar energy storage even at nighttime. The team is now working on a larger prototype.
This research has a chance to rewrite how we store and use solar power, said Fuqiang Liu, an assistant professor in the Materials Science and Engineering Department who led the research team. As renewable energy becomes more prevalent, the ability to store solar energy and use it as a renewable alternative provides a sustainable solution to the problem of energy shortage. It also can effectively harness the inexhaustible energy from the sun.
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http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/cs502024k