Novel solar cell designs based on atomic layer deposition
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- With the effects of pollution and global warming playing a larger and larger role in today's world, the case for the development of clean photovoltaic technologies to replace the dirty fuels that we have relied on since nearly the beginning of the Industrial Revolution is a straightforward one. Despite the recent inroads that solar energy has made into the electricity generation markets, there are still no existing technologies that can compete with coal, oil and natural gas from an economic perspective without significant government subsidies. Moreover, the vicious competition in the photovoltaic space has resulted in large solar panel price drops but primarily at the expense of profit margins leading to a mass extinction of cell manufacturers. No existing photovoltaic technology has a significant advantage and the fierce competition between numerous, equally matched adversaries has led to a fractured marketplace and has hindered the growth of the entire industry. In this work, a novel set of solar cell designs centered around the use of atomic layer deposition (ALD) is presented. The overriding goal is the drastic reduction of the installed cost while simultaneously maintaining the high performance achieved in current commercial single-junction solar cells. This is achieved through a three part approach: an ALD-enabled silicon heterojunction architecture chosen to optimize cell efficiency while taking advantage of the low cost ALD process, a technique for synthesizing thin c-Si solar cell absorber sheets that minimizes silicon material cost and reduces the cell weight, and a method for texturing a silicon surface with a shaped nanocone array to enable absorption of the majority of incident light while also eliminating the need for sun-tracking and associated installation costs. Each of the three primary innovations is discussed in detail as is their synthesis into final optimized devices that exhibit overall conversion efficiencies in excess of 22%. With the performance of this architecture nearly matching that of champion commercial cells, it presents a promising new approach with the potential to usher in the next generation of low-cost, high-efficiency photovoltaics.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2014 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Iancu, Andrei T |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Mechanical Engineering. |
| Primary advisor | Prinz, F. B |
| Thesis advisor | Prinz, F. B |
| Thesis advisor | McGehee, Michael |
| Thesis advisor | Miller, D. A. B |
| Advisor | McGehee, Michael |
| Advisor | Miller, D. A. B |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Andrei T. Iancu. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Mechanical Engineering. |
| Thesis | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2014. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2014 by Andrei Teodor Iancu
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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