Technology Of Solar Cells

By Author: Derek Lily
Total Articles: 42
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Concentrating photovoltaic's uses lenses and mirrors to focus the sun's energy. This technology includes both a low-concentration

approach, which increases the sun's magnification by between two and a hundred times, and a high

concentration approach, which can increase the magnification by tons of suns when the PV potency

surpasses 40%. CPV uses less photovoltaic material and increases performance, hopefully enough

to offset any extra costs.

Concentrating Photovoltaics and Thermal ( CPVT ) is another technology ; this produces both electricity and thermal heat in the

same module. Thermal energy itself is an advantage from the sun, and other plants have a design of a solar

energy tower in which the mirrors focus sunlight on a heat receiver at the top that collects the heat and

transfers it to piping inside the tower where is it circulated and used to make electricity. The design minimizes the

field of piping to the vertical tower height to about a hundred meters and can reach

temperatures higher than 1000 degrees.While currently there are very ...
... few commercially

operating tower installations, primarily based on news, this technology may grow

quickly.

The Solar two tower in California is an example of this technology and has the capacity to produce 10

megawatts of power. Due to its success, Solar Tres is being built in Spain ; this will be 3

times larger than the Solar two plant and have a capacity of 17 megawatts. As it is, Solar Two's tower

has been removed in 2009 to make room for a bigger solar project. Another solar thermal technology is the

parabolic trough. The SEGS plants in California utilize this technology and have a capacity of 33

megawatts each. Nevada Solar One is another terribly large CSP project with a capacity of 64

megawatts, using Flabeg AG troughs made in Germany.

When we look into photovoltaic cell technology and the materials used, internationally

crystalline silicon has been used as the light-absorbing semiconductor in most solar cells, although it is a

comparatively poor absorber of light and needs a considerable thickness of material.

However, it has proved convenient because it yields stable solar cells with

good efficiencies. There are two types of crystalline silicon are used in the sector. The

1st is mono crystalline, produced by slicing wafers from a high-purity single crystal. The second is multi

crystalline silicon, manufactured by sawing a cast block of silicon first into bars and then wafers. Most efficient production cells use mono crystalline c-Si with laser grooved, buried grid contacts for

optimum light absorption and current collection. The main trend in crystalline silicon cell manufacture is toward multicrystalline technology. And for both mono- and multicrystalline Si, a semiconductor homo junction is formed by

diffusing phosphorus into the top surface of the boron doped ( p-type ) Si wafer. Screen-printed contacts are applied to the

front and rear of the cell, with the front contact pattern specifically

engineered to allow maximum light exposure of the Si material with minimum electric (

resistive ) losses in the cell. Crystalline silicon cell technology forms about 90% of solar cell demand. The

balance comes from thin film technologies. Roughly 45% of the cost of a silicon cell solar module is driven

by the cost of the silicon wafer, a further 35% is driven by the materials required to assemble the solar

module.
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