Environmental News Network

Iron Infusion Proves Effective to Treat Anaemia in Rural Africa

Iron-deficiency anaemia is a major concern in low-income settings, especially for women.

Using a Soft Crystal to Visualize How Absorbed Carbon Dioxide Behaves in Liquid

A team of scientists has succeeded in visualizing how carbon dioxide (CO2) behaves in an ionic liquid that selectively absorbs CO2.

Thanksgiving Weekend Forecast: Rain and Snowfall for Many Parts of U.S.

NOAA National Weather Service forecasters are predicting rain and moderate snow in portions of the country as we head into the Thanksgiving holiday weekend.

Guiding the Way to Improved Solar Cell Performance

Understanding how particles travel through a device is vital for improving the efficiency of solar cells. Researchers from KAUST, working with an international team of scientists, have now developed a set of design guidelines for enhancing the performance of molecular materials.

When a packet of light, or photon, is absorbed by a semiconductor, it generates a pair of particles known as an exciton. An electron is one part of this pair; the other is its positively charged equivalent, called a hole. Excitons are electrically neutral, so it is impossible to set them in motion by applying an electric field. Instead the excitons "hop" by a random motion or diffusion. The dissociation of the excitons into charges is necessary to create a current but is highly improbable in an organic semiconductor.

“So typically, we need to blend two semiconductors, a so-called electron donor and an electron acceptor, to efficiently generate free charges,” explains Yuliar Firdaus. “The donor and acceptor materials penetrate into one another; maximizing the exciton diffusion length— the distance the exciton can travel before recombining and being lost— is crucial for optimizing the organic solar cell’s performance.