LONDON — Wafer supplier IQE plc (Cardiff, Wales) has said that its subsidiary company Wafer Technology Ltd. (Milton Keynes, England) will lead a collaborative R&D project to develop thermo-photovoltaic cells for the generation of electricity from the waste heat of industrial processes.
The project has been awarded £2 million (about $2.8 million) by the U.K. government's Technology Strategy Board. Wafer Technology will lead a consortium of partners including Lancaster University and QinetiQ.
IQE did not say how long the project would last or how much of their own money the participants would be expected to spend.
The project is expected to create novel low-bandgap TPV devices based on alloys including InAsSb and InGaSbN lattices matched to GaSb substrates. Such cells will exhibit significantly higher efficiencies than existing devices and will more effectively generate electricity from waste heat sources at temperatures below 1000 degrees C, IQE said.
Wafer Technology's contribution will be to extend their GaSb substrate technology to 4-inch diameter. Lancaster University and QinetiQ will undertake epitaxial growth studies of these novel narrow gap alloys and QinetiQ will also fabricate the devices. Prototype TPV systems will be validated by two further industrial partners to assess their performance in real industrial processes and environments.
"Thermo-voltaic cells will play an important role in the drive towards providing an efficient and cost-effective way of recovering waste energy from a wide range of industrial processes and recycling that energy into electricity," said Mark Furlong, sales and marketing director at Wafer Technology Ltd., in a statement issued by IQE. "TPV's add to the growing portfolio of the group's energy efficient products that include ultra high brightness LEDs and high efficiency concentrator-photovoltaic solar cells."
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