Gas blending applications for thin film solar cells development
3Pages

MCQ Gas Blender 100 Series High Performance Gas flow Dilutor & Gas flow Mixing System with User Interface www.mcqinst.com Gas Blender 100 Series Application Note 1/3 Introduction Since the last 30 years, industry has made great strides in the development of sources for sustainable energies (also known as green energies). After the success of anti-global warming awareness campaign undertaken by all countries, switching to green energy production has become a must. A significant optimization of sustainable production techniques, in order to obtain necessary and satisfying results, has become a priority. Between all modern techniques of sustainable energy production, sunlight based technology is one of the most developed and promising application. This technology makes use of solid state devices, called solar cells, which are capable to generate electricity directly from sunlight via photovoltaic effect. Optimization of sunlight technology aims now to increase solar cells efficiency and to lower the production costs of these devices. Solar Cell Development Silicon is, and has been, the more used and one of the more suitable material for solar cell manufacturing processes. Apart from its chemical and physical properties (which makes it adequate for sunlight adsorption purposes), silicon has been chosen for its great industrial availability. In the early stages of solar cells development, silicon was obtained from the huge amount of crystalline silicon (c-Si) wafers discarded by microprocessor manufacturing industries. Those type of wafers were made by monocrystalline silicon (an efficient but expensive material), soon replaced by polycrystalline silicon (less efficient but considerably cheaper). Just recently a new technology based on the use of amorphous silicon (a-Si), produced with common CVD techniques, has emerged. Usually we refer to solar cell based on p-n junction principle as first generation Application Note Gas blending applications for thin film solar cells development MCQ Gas Blender 100 Series CVD-related Application The three major sources of renewable energy: sun, wind and biomass exploitation photovoltaic cells. The advent of a-Si thin films has allowed to undertake development of two new solar cells generations. Second generation cells are still based on p-n junction principle but are produced replacing the common thick c-Si with an amorphous silicon thin layer. The main advantage of this devices isn’t the efficiency (a-Si solar cells have lower energy conversion efficiency compared with c-Si ones) but the cost. Silicon’s cost is by far the largest production factor in solar cell manufacturing and a-Si cells production requires approximately 1% of the silicon needed for typical c-Si cells. Now the new target of the research is the development of third generation cells. Third generation cells are multi-layer structure devices, composed by a combination of a-Si and c-Si (or other ceramic materials) thin layers. Unlike first and second generation cells, this kind of photovoltaic devices are based on a multi-junction principle. This new approach makes them more efficient in converting sunlight into electricity but also requires more complex and more expensive production process. SUN WIND BIOMASS

MCQ Gas Blender 100 Series High Performance Gas flow Dilutor & Gas flow Mixing System with User Interface www.mcqinst.com Gas Blender 100 Series Application Note 2/3 example of this new technology’s usefulness are the thin film solar panels. Thin film panels are particularly suitable for buildings installation (usually roofs or other dedicated surfaces) and at the same time they present more advantages then common industrial panels made by first generation solar cells. Aside from their low weight, thin film solar panels are relatively easy to install, can be walked on and aren’t subjected...

MCQ Gas Blender 100 Series High Performance Gas flow Dilutor & Gas flow Mixing System with User Interface www.mcqinst.com Gas Blender 100 Series Application Note 2/? performance of micro micromorph tandem solar cells – Renewable Energy 33, 1 (2008) 42-47. [4] J. Zhu, H. Zhao, C. Jiang, J. Han, M. Tan and S. Du, Boron doped amorphous diamond window layer deposited by filtered arc for amorphous silicon alloy p–i–n solar cells - Sol Energy Mater Sol Cells 93, 9 (2009) 1652-1656. [5] H. Matsui, T. Saito, J.K. Saha and H. Shirai, Correlation between micro-roughness, surface chemistry, and...