Intersolar Europe in Munich: HZB research meets solar industry
Intersolar Europe is the world’s leading exhibition for the solar industry and its partners and takes place annually at the Messe München exhibition center in Munich, Germany.
© Solar Promotion GmbH
At the major international photovoltaics exhibition from 31 May to 2 June 2017, Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin (HZB) will be exhibiting solar energy research projects and presenting opportunities for industrial cooperation in the field of photovoltaics (PV).
Intersolar Europe is a world leading event where manufacturers, suppliers, distributors and service providers come to learn of new developments in the solar industry. A team from Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin will be presenting its research in the field of renewable energies at this exhibition in Hall A2, Booth 574 – in particular, the new Helmholtz Innovation Lab HySPRINT and the long-established competence centre for photovoltaics PVcomB. These two institutes primarily address the scientific-technical issues of technology transfer and cooperate closely with industrial partners.
In the Helmholtz Innovation Lab HySPRINT, silicon-based materials are being combined with organometallic perovskite crystals to develop so-called hybrid tandem cells. Such cells can be used for solar generation of electricity or hydrogen.
The Competence Centre Thin-Film- and Nanotechnology for Photovoltaics Berlin (PVcomB) has industrial reference lines for manufacturing CIGS and silicon photovoltaics. Teams of HZB experts are collaborating with industry to develop novel thin-film technologies and products. Joint research projects with industrial partners have already culminated in many successful innovations.
Research into new material systems for photovoltaics is an important focal topic at HZB. The Centre is specialised in so-called energy materials that convert or store energy. This includes solar cells, material systems for generating hydrogen from sunlight, and magnetic material systems for developing energy-efficient information technologies. For studying interfaces and surfaces of thin films, HZB operates the photon source BESSY II and a series of CoreLabs with latest generation equipment.
HZB’s info stand is in Hall A2, Booth 574 (A2.574)
- Battery research: visualisation of aging processes operandoLithium button cells with electrodes made of nickel-manganese-cobalt oxides (NMC) are very powerful. Unfortunately, their capacity decreases over time. Now, for the first time, a team has used a non-destructive method to observe how the elemental composition of the individual layers in a button cell changes during charging cycles. The study, now published in the journal Small, involved teams from the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB), the University of Münster, researchers from the SyncLab research group at HZB and the BLiX laboratory at the Technical University of Berlin. Measurements were carried out in the BLiX laboratory and at the BESSY II synchrotron radiation source.
- New instrument at BESSY II: The OÆSE endstation in EMILA new instrument is now available at BESSY II for investigating catalyst materials, battery electrodes and other energy devices under operating conditions: the Operando Absorption and Emission Spectroscopy on EMIL (OÆSE) endstation in the Energy Materials In-situ Laboratory Berlin (EMIL). A team led by Raul Garcia-Diez and Marcus Bär showcases the instrument’s capabilities via a proof-of-concept study on electrodeposited copper.
- An elegant method for the detection of single spins using photovoltageDiamonds with certain optically active defects can be used as highly sensitive sensors or qubits for quantum computers, where the quantum information is stored in the electron spin state of these colour centres. However, the spin states have to be read out optically, which is often experimentally complex. Now, a team at HZB has developed an elegant method using a photo voltage to detect the individual and local spin states of these defects. This could lead to a much more compact design of quantum sensors.