{"id":141,"date":"2016-04-21T13:09:51","date_gmt":"2016-04-21T17:09:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/solarenergylocal.com\/news\/?p=141"},"modified":"2016-04-21T13:09:27","modified_gmt":"2016-04-21T17:09:27","slug":"new-solar-cells-can-harvest-heat-in-the-dark","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.solarenergylocal.com\/news\/new-solar-cells-can-harvest-heat-in-the-dark\/","title":{"rendered":"New solar cells can harvest heat in the dark"},"content":{"rendered":"<h2>New metamaterial might change everything<\/h2>\n<p>The evolution of solar power may be taking a very interesting turn, as a team of scientists claim to have created a new optical magnetic metamaterial that could be a game-changer.<\/p>\n<p>A research team from the Australian National University (ANU) and the University of California Berkeley (UC Berkeley) discovered radical new properties in an artificial material (also referred to as a nanomaterial or metamaterial) that could pave the way to a whole new type of solar power.<\/p>\n<h3>Solar power &#8230; without sunlight<\/h3>\n<p>And the radical new properties? Well, the new metamaterial possesses a physical property known as magnetic hyperbolic dispersion. So, scientific terms aside, this new metamaterial basically glows in an unusual way when heated.<\/p>\n<p>So, if combined with thermophotovoltaic cells &#8212; cells that convert radiated heat into electricity &#8212; this new metamaterial could ultimately be part of high-efficiency thermophotovoltaic cells that could harvest heat in the dark.<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-width=\"550\">\n<p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">Radical new nano-material could drive move to solar cells that work in the dark <a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/Fj446YxYjR\">https:\/\/t.co\/Fj446YxYjR<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/cs0r01I04D\">pic.twitter.com\/cs0r01I04D<\/a><\/p>\n<p>&mdash; ANU Media (@ANUmedia) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/ANUmedia\/status\/722639378619703299\">April 20, 2016<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<h3>The potential of thermophotovoltaic cells<\/h3>\n<p>Thermophotovoltaic cells do not require sunlight to create electricity, as the cells harvest heat in the form of infrared radiation.<\/p>\n<p>According to Dr Sergey Kruk of the ANU Research School of Physics and Engineering, thermophotovoltaic cells actually have the potential to beat the efficiency of solar cells by a wide margin. Some estimates give thermophotovoltaic cells the potential to be twice as efficient as solar cells.<\/p>\n<p>So &#8230; a new generation of solar cells that could potentially generate electricity in the dark? This could indeed be a major breakthrough in the realm of solar power.<\/p>\n<span class=\"source-attribution\">Orginally published on &rarr; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.e-wisdom.com\/news\/the-evolution-of-solar-cells-solar-power-without-sunlight\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\">E-Wisdom<\/a><\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A new generation of solar cells that could generate electricity in the dark? This could be a major breakthrough in the realm of solar power.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":143,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[3,6,30,24],"class_list":["post-141","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-solar","tag-solar-energy","tag-solar-power","tag-technology","tag-weird-news"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.solarenergylocal.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.solarenergylocal.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.solarenergylocal.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.solarenergylocal.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.solarenergylocal.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=141"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.solarenergylocal.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":529,"href":"https:\/\/www.solarenergylocal.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141\/revisions\/529"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.solarenergylocal.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/143"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.solarenergylocal.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=141"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.solarenergylocal.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=141"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.solarenergylocal.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=141"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}