Amorphous Silicon Solar Cells - Design and Fabrication

Open Circuit voltage and short circuit current will depend entirely on the purity of your Silicon.

As for thickness, that depends on the method you are using to slice the Si wafers from the ingot.

Doping concentrations...my young apprentice...are trade secrets.

You are very ambitious and unless you are hiding a state of the art factory in your basement or have the keys to a state of the art University lab...

I am one of few who had interest may be close to start of the solar although I never worked in producing solar cell.

The solar was not a Fab grade silicon and is not ultra pure and you do not need it as long as you have ability to push garbage out from silicon surface few microns is good enough

First generation solar silicon was used silicon by semi conductor business. When prime wafer was phosphrous treated we used silicon as carrier so prime does not get in contact with stainless steel, Invar and Kovar materials used for belt.

When this got contaminated and had no use solar guys used it to develop the initial solar cell by surface cleaning to push iron, chrome and nickel in the body of silicon.

The technology differed from place to place. Then solar started pulliing own wafer and thin hex but they are no where close to semi needs of wafer quality.

It is materials like front silver, back alumina and silver, ITO and the P/n junction which determines the cell quality.

One can improve fill factor by controlling the surface and not more than 2 micron subsurface, back coating properties, fron silver and improve if he or she can produce some power with the glass goes no in silver wich is do able. I have developed glasses which helped to improve the fill factor and poer efficiency and that based silver paste is still used around world and then my interest change to portable type of energy product some thing like cigrate lighter world had and that needed glass to work at high temperature 800 oC and above.

This was a good challenge and I have done and have glass to do that. But solar you can do on just window glass and any one interested I can walk him through efficiency will be little lower intially but with time will meet the challenge and beat the silicon

I can go on

Interesting...

Let me see if I understand you correctly.

1) Window Glass

2) Silver Compound (percentage?, carrier type?)

3) Alumina (activated?)

Take an ordinary window glass with natural doping from impurites, squeegy on your alumina-silver composite on the back, bake in oven for sintering, make traces on silk screen, squeegy on your silver compound, bake in oven to evaporate solvent and you now have a solar cell.

Or do I have it completely wrong?

Please explain in step by step fashion how you have created a solar cell using window glass, the results you achieved, equipment used, etc...If you can achieve more than 8% efficiency it would be worth doing. Explain how you deposit the Al2O3-Ag onto the surface, the percentage composition, temperatures etc...

I would definitely like to try this out. I've got the glass, lots of silver compound and there are two bauxite factory here siting idle waiting for the price of aluminum to increase.

1. Is correct use window glass

Wash the window glass. Coat with SiO2 ( cheap way is using sol gel), Reduce SiO2 to Si or you can deposit Si using SiCl4 therma;l deposition on heated window glass. If you need to know full we can talk out side of this.

2. Have silver glass (front silver) Current silver glass from shoei, Ferro, Johnson MAtthey and others will not work since they have high temperature glass but there is company in India call Clobal Applied Materials can provide yousilver glass which will be good for this use.

They have developed glasses whic his world is using and they have unique pastes and if you work with them they will make this happen for you

3. Not Al2O3 but aluminum (back aluminum)

Aluminum needs to be dopped with boron to make it muddy so reflects the photon back for conversion.

Other is to modify the coating to get some out from the glass surface and front silver.

Adding all these I can assure you will have more than 8% what you need

If I am any further help you can always contact me on my gmail address Masyood@gmail.cim or on cell +1 617-777-5363

I have to make a project on 'production technology for amorphous silicon based flexible solar cells'. Please send me the related information on this or via email.

Anwesha

Hi, May i know if its an undergrad project or an M.E project... Anyways, you can read about the fabrication technologies like Plasma Enhanced Chemical Vapor Deposition at RF or ultra high frequency. There are many papers in Science direct regarding the same.

I am doing my Engineering from India. The project is for one of my papers (Solid State Energy Transforms)

If you are looking for potential of manufacturing based on flexible substrate then you need to go front conductor and back reflector materials based on flexiable polymeric systems.

The polymeric front silver is made by good number of company but you need to define degree of bend and number of bend you need to have before materials starts creating internal defects.

This is typically of graduate students will not consider unless he is guided by professor or the the advisory committee members