Renewable Energy Group

Cranfield University has had an active interest in materials for renewable energy for many years, focusing on thin film solar cells and fuel cells. Our interest in solar cells began in the early 1980s with amorphous silicon devices and in the 1990s its focus moved to heterojunction solar cells. These include CdS/CdTe, ZnS/CuInS2 based devices grown by physical vapour deposition, chemical bath deposition, spray pyrolysis and close space sublimation. Our work has provided valuable data on these materials, which has enabled us to construct a detailed model for CdS/CdTe cells. We are also studying CuInS2 cells based on ‘environmentally friendly’ spray deposition processes and were the first UK group to examine novel ‘extremely thin absorber layer’ (ETA) cells.

The Fuel Cell Group was formed in 1994 to extend the very successful work on membranes for advanced batteries started some 20 years earlier. Our achievements include being the first in the UK to demonstrate that radiation graft copolymers could offer excellent fuel cell performance, demonstration of market-leading performances for direct methanol fuel cells, and the latest work demonstrating that membranes made by radiation graft copolymerisation are capable of being successfully tailored to a wide range of new fuel cell systems such as alkaline electrolyte and borohydride fuel cells.

Our work is funded by the EPSRC, MOD, DTI and industry, and is in collaboration with other leading universities.We are part of the EPSRC funded Supergen consortium Photovoltaic Materials for the 21st Century