ABOUT BLUGlass -  Blusolar

BluSolar is a wholly owned subsidiary of BluGlass Limited and was established to explore and commercialise an exciting breakthrough in the solar industry, and is working towards the development of a nitride solar cell using BluGlass’ patented manufacturing technology, Remote Plasma Chemical Vapour Deposition (RPCVD).

Although there are many materials from which solar cells can be developed, there is an emerging material family with the potential to convert almost the full spectrum of sunlight – from the infrared, visible and ultraviolet – to electrical current. This material family is BluGlass’ area of expertise – group III nitrides, specifically the indium gallium nitride (InGaN) alloy.

InGaN semiconductors have many advantages over current materials making them an exciting prospect for new high efficiency solar cell applications.

InGaN solar cells have the potential to be long lasting, relatively inexpensive and importantly the most efficient ever created.  

This potential comes from the fact that InGaN has a direct band gap with wide tunability. These properties allow more energy from the solar spectrum to be captured efficiently into the cell and converted to power. Research has state that InGaN solar cells could produce efficiencies of more than 50%¹ which would be the biggest breakthrough in solar cell efficiency since the industries inception.

A low temperature process such as RPCVD is critical in InGaN development to capture rich indium content into the InGaN layers. The high temperatures of other manufacturing methods inhibit the indium content as the fragile InGaN bonds break at high temperatures.

BluSolar is working towards a high efficiency solar cell prototype and has been awarded a Climate Ready grant of $4.95 million to expedite its research progress.

BluSolar will license the RPCVD process from BluGlass Limited.

^{Source: 1. Jani et al. Applied Physics Letter 91, 132117-3 (2007)}