More Productive PV Panel – Guest Post by Shannon Combs

Title: College of Illinois Researchers Demonstrate Little Known Approaches to Make More Productive PV Panels

Although silicon is the industry standard semiconductor in the majority of electrical devices, including the photovoltaic cells that pv panels use to transform sunshine into electricity, it is hardly the most efficient material on the market. For example, the semiconductor gallium arsenide and similar ingredient semiconductors give practically double the effectiveness as silicon in solar products, but they are rarely used in utility-scale applications because of their excessive construction value.

University of Illinois (http://illinois.edu/) professors J. Rogers and X. Li discovered lower-cost methods to manufacture thin films of gallium arsenide that also granted versatility in the kinds of units they might be integrated into.

If you could reduce considerably the expense of gallium arsenide and other compound semiconductors, then you could increase their range of applications.

Usually, gallium arsenide is placed in a individual thin layer on a little wafer. Either the wanted device is produced directly on the wafer, or the semiconductor-coated wafer is break up into chips of the preferred size. The Illinois group chose to put in several layers of the material on a single wafer, making a layered, “pancake” stack of gallium arsenide thin films.

If you grow ten layers in a single growth, you only have to load the wafer one time. If you do this in 10 growths, loading and unloading with heat range ramp-up and ramp-down take a lot of time. If you consider what is needed for every growth – the equipment, the preparation, the time, the workers – the overhead saving this solution offers is a substantial price reduction.

Next the experts individually peel off the layers and shift them. To complete this, the stacks swap layers of aluminum arsenide with the gallium arsenide. Bathing the stacks in a solution of acid and an oxidizing agent dissolves the layers of aluminum arsenide, freeing the single small sheets of gallium arsenide. A soft stamp-like device selects up the levels, just one at a time from the top down, for shift to another substrate – glass, plastic material or silicon, depending on the application. Next the wafer may be reused for one more growth.

By doing this it’s possible to generate much more material a lot more rapidly and a lot more cost effectively. This process could generate mass amounts of material, as compared to just the thin single-layer way in which it is typically grown.

Freeing the material from the wafer also opens the opportunity of flexible, thin-film electronics made with gallium arsenide or other high-speed semiconductors. To make devices that can conform but still retain higher performance, which is significant.

In a document shared on-line May 20 in the magazine Nature (http://www.nature.com/), the team explains its procedures and shows 3 kinds of devices utilizing gallium arsenide chips manufactured in multilayer stacks: light devices, high-speed transistors and photo voltaic cells. The creators additionally offer a detailed price evaluation.

Another advantage associated with the multilayer technique is the release from area constraints, particularly essential for solar cells. As the layers are taken out from the stack, they can be laid out side-by-side on another substrate to produce a significantly larger surface area, whereas the standard single-layer method confines area to the dimension of the wafer.

For solar panels, you want big area coverage to get as much sunshine as possible. In an extreme case we could develop sufficient levels to have 10 times the area of the conventional.

Next, the group programs to explore more potential unit applications and other semiconductor resources that could adapt to multilayer growth.

About the Source – Shannon Combs contributes articles for the residential solar panels blog, her personal hobby website based on recommendations to assist home owners to conserve energy with sun power.

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Don’t forget to listen to “yours truly, Tim” interviewed by Diane Tegarden on her BTR(Blog Talk Radio) show. The show will air July 13 at 10am PST, 11am MST, 12 noon CST and 1pm EST. You can access it on your computer at Diane’s BTR Alternative Energy Show or call toll free at 1 877 221-6957. For the link to spiral air foil, Click Here

If I don’t hear from you before next week, I’ll “see” you then. God Bless You Tim

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