Valorisation news: Toyota finances AMOLF research

On November 10th a special project together with Toyota was launched at AMOLF. Toyota finances the one year term of postdoc Enrique Canovas in the group of Mischa Bonn, who will do fundamental research into the building blocks for a possible new generation of solar cells.

Toyota’s ultimate goal is to cover the surface of the car body with solar cells. With that, part of the electricity use of the car can be produced. Today, solar cell concepts aren’t efficient enough to be cost competitive versus conventional energy sources, but with the research efforts on new concepts from the nanophotovoltaics program, AMOLF hopes to contribute to a solution.

Enrique Canovas: "By the analysis of carrier dynamics between colloidal quantum dots and oxides we expect to demonstrate the feasibility of the so called hot carrier solar cells, which have been theoretically proposed as highly efficient photovoltaic devices"

Nanophotovoltaics website