Till now Silicon is still the most common material for solar cells production,can any material or a compound compete with silicon in the future?
There is tremendous advancements in producing silicon for solar cells. It is the solar grade silicon. This type of silicon is much cheaper than the electronic grade silicon. The basic idea behind this advancement is the direct extraction of solar grade silicon from metallurgical grade silicon. The researchers make full use of the observation that solar cells can be fabricated from silicon having much less purity than conventional electronic devices. It is well known that as the purity of the material increases it gets more expensive.
Does silicon remain the king of materials for solar cell?
Please share!.
Dear Abdelhalim,
Silicon has many advantages over other materials concerning solar cell applications and its manufacturing has acquired a high degree of maturity. Despite silicon solar cells were born around 50 years ago, they have survived to a lot of new technologies and materials being the leader material. Hence, there is no doubt about the permanence of silicon solar cells in the world-wide future photovoltaic prospect. However, with the promise of new compound materials and devices which could exceed the theoretical 31% conversion efficiency limit I think silicon will begin to lose the first place. Huge research efforts are being done in this field and will probably succeed in the following decades as what is called the photovoltaic third-generation devices.
Regards!
Thank you for your contribution dr. Budini.
I want to see some statistics and some recent studies on other materials other than silicon because i follow silicon solar cells and i estimate that silicon will dominate for many coming years.
Absolutely, silicon based solar cells will still dominate for several years from now. I was talking about a couple of decades at least to revert the trend. This period is quite long nowadays. May be you will find useful these reports:
- http://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/de/downloads/pdf-files/aktuelles/photovoltaics-report.pdf
- http://www.irena.org/DocumentDownloads/Publications/RE_Technologies_Cost_Analysis-SOLAR_PV.pdf
Regards.
Hi, I attach another paper of interest in this field: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.renene.2007.05.024
Regards.
Thank you for your effort Budini. The documents are in agreement with my expectations.
Thank you, Dr. Budini for such useful links of overview of the subject.
Dear Sen,you thanked Budini and over looked the man who excited the subject.
Dear Abdelhalim Zekry, sorry. I must thank you for initiating the discussion.
Thank you Dr. Budini for the interesting reports and thank you Dr. Abdelhalim Zekry for exciting this subject.
Silicon will be the main driver for PV solar cells in the next coming year. Projected cost in 2015 are down to 42 cent per Wp. This is truly remarkable considering that the cost of silicon was 2.4$ per Wp three years ago. This will als put a huge strain on thin film CdTe and CIGS which are selling at 60cent per Wp.
Thank you, Abdelhalim Zekry for the very interesting question which stimulated useful discussion.
I would like to know what is the efficiency of solar cells based on solar grade silicon and electronic grade silicon? It is clear that for the less pure silicon its electronic properties and efficiency decreases. Is there such information?
Dear Prof. Gnatenko,
Thank you for your complement.
The solar grade material is a material suitable for producing high efficiency solar cells approaching that of electronic grade silicon. It is important to say that the optimum doping concentration for solar cells is 10^17 /cm^3 which is about 1000 times that of electronic grade silicon for integrated circuits and electronic devices.This makes basically tremendous purification cost saving without impact on the solar cell efficiency. The metallic impurities can easily be extracted from silicon by segregation. In this way one can obtain silicon with sufficiently high minority carrier lifetime which is the other important material property for high efficiency solar cells. For more details see the attached file as an example.
Dear Dr. Abdelhalim Zekry,
Thank you. I received an exhaustive answer.
Thereis also an interesting area of reserch in quasi-mono crystalline wafer in which have reached 20% efficiency. I ahve attached a link that shows Shott solar wafers.http://www.schott.com/solar/english/news/press.html?so=uk&lang=english&NID=3499
Silicon nanostructures and hybrid devices based silicon nano structures are very efficient for all ranges even visible, infrared and ultraviolet. i think, to replace silicon with some other material is very difficult in upcoming years too. and thanks to all researchers for nice discussion.
Dear colleagues,
here you find a very useful report on the advancement of solar cell technologies.
You can find all the efficiency for solar cells in this usufel link fron Progress in Photovoltaics. I can add only the link. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/pip.2352/abstract
Dear Collegues,
Find attached a report on : Development Trend for High Purity Silicon
Raw Material Technologies
— Expecting Innovative Silicon Manufacturing Processes
for Solar Cell Applications —
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