Search

In this paper, an acoustic system with broadband asymmetric transmission is designed and fabricated, which consists of a water-immersed aluminum plate engraved with quasi-periodically-patterned ridges on single surface. It demonstrates that when the acoustic waves are launched into the system from the structured side, they can couple into the Lamb modes in the plate efficiently and attain a high transmission; on the contrary, when the waves are incident from the opposite flat side, the coupling is weak, and the transmission is low. Superior to systems with periodic patterning, this quasi-periodically-patterned system has a broad working frequency range due to the collective contributions from the multiple diffractions specific to the structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, negative signals are frequently observed during the measuring process of monochromatic incident photon-to-electron conversion efficiency (IPCE) for sensitized solar cells by DC method. This phenomenon is confusing and hindering the reasonable evaluation of solar cells. Here, cause of negative IPCE values is studied by taking quantum dot-sensitized solar cell (QDSC) as an example, and the accurate measurement method to avoid the negative value is suggested. The negative background signals of QDSC without illumination are found the direct cause of the negative IPCE values by DC method. Ambient noise, significant capacitance characteristics, and uncontrolled electrochemical reaction all can lead to the negative background signals. When the photocurrent response of device under monochromatic light illumination is relatively weak, the actual photocurrent signals will be covered by the negative background signals and the resulting IPCE values will appear negative. To improve the signal-to-noise ratio, quasi-AC method is proposed for IPCE measurement of solar cells with weak photocurrent response based on the idea of replacing the absolute values by the relative values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]