While the technology employed by the fourth industrial revolution promises effective solutions to the world’s energy crisis, nature promises more. Also, while the data produced by interconnected platforms offer incredible insight into production systems, nature’s inter-related systems have already perfected the process.
“While the widely used photovoltaic cells mimic the first steps of photosynthesis by converting solar energy into electrical energy, they are very expensive to manufacture,” he explains. “If we don’t use expensive means to remove impurities and other defects from conventional photovoltaic cells, the absorbed energy will be lost on its way to the electrodes, because most of it will be trapped by the defects.
“One of the research threads of the UP Biophysics Research Group is to study the design principles of the photosystems and identify ways to apply some of these principles to solar cells,” Prof Krüger says. “In collaboration with researchers from Addis Ababa and Tokyo, we have started to work on organic solar cells, which share many similarities with the photosystems of photosynthetic organisms.