Solar Cell
Solar Cell
Why do we have to dig for coal or digging for oil when there’s a massive power plant high above us that is sending out free, clean energy? The Sun as a burning mass of nuclide energy, has enough fuel to provide power to this Solar System for five billion more years. Solar panels can transform this energy into an unending amount of electricity.
While solar power might seem odd or futuristic but it’s actually quite widespread. A solar-powered watch or calculator for your purse could be on your wrist. Many gardeners are equipped with solar-powered lighting. Solar panels are commonly seen on spacecrafts and satellites. NASA one of the American Space Agency, has also created the first solar-powered plane. Global warming is harming our planet and it is likely that solar energy will be an increasingly important source of energy that is renewable. How does it work?
What is the maximum amount of solar power we can get from the Sun?
It’s amazing how solar power functions. Each square meter of Earth receives on average 163 watts solar energy. This figure will be discussed in more detail in the next paragraph. It means you could place an electric table lamp of 150 watts on every square meter of Earth and make use of the Sun’s electrical energy to light up the entire planet. Another way to think about it is that If we could cover just one percent from the Sahara desert with solar cells, it would be possible to create enough electricity to power the entire world. The great thing about solar energy is that there’s a lot of it, much more than we could ever require.
There is a downside. The Sun’s energy arrives as a mixture of light and heat. Both are vital. The light helps plants grow, and also provides food for us. Heat keeps us sufficiently warm to survive. But, we can’t use the Sun’s light or heat directly to power a TV or car. It is important to convert solar energy into a different form of energy we can use more easily like electricity. This is precisely what solar cells do.
In summary:
- The cell’s surface is illuminated by sunlight
- Photons transmit energy through cells’ layers.
- Photons transmit energy to electrons that reside in lower layers.
- The energy used by electrons to let electrons escape the circuit, and return into the upper layers.
- The power for a device is provided by electrons that move around the circuit.
What are solar cells?
A solar cell is an electronic device which captures sunlight and converts it into electricity. It is about equal to the hand of an adult and is octagonal in shape and colored in a bluish-black color. A variety of solar cells are able to be joined together to form bigger units, also known as modules. These modules are then linked to larger units referred to as solar panels. (The black- or blue-tinted tiles you see on homes generally have hundreds of solar cells per roof) Or chopped into chips (to provide power to small devices like digital watches and pockets calculators).
The cells of solar panels work the same manner as batteries. But, unlike battery’s cells that produce electricity from chemicals, solar panels’ cells capture sunlight to create electricity. Photovoltaic cell (PV) are able to produce electricity using sunlight (photo comes from the Greek word for light). The word “voltaic”, however, is a reference to Alessandro Volta (1745-1827), an Italian electric pioneer.
Light is often thought of as tiny particles called photons. A sun’s beam can be thought of similar to a huge white firehose, which shoots trillions upon trillions. A solar panel can be placed in the direction of these light beams to collect them and transform them into an electrical current. Every cell can produce a few volts, so the job of solar panels is to combine energy from many cells to produce an appropriate amount of electric energy and voltage. Today’s solar cells are almost all made of slices of silicon (one the most common chemical elements{ found|| that are found} on Earth, found within sand). However, as we’ll discover, other materials could be a possibility. The sun’s energy blasts electrons from a solar cell when it’s exposed to sunlight. They can then be used to power any electronic device powered by electricity.
How are solar cells made?
Silicon is the main material from which microchips’ transistors (tiny switches) are created. Solar cells also work in a similar manner. It is also a form of material. Conductors are the materials that allow electricity to flow smoothly through them, like metals.
Others, like plastics and wood, aren’t able to allow electricity to flow through them. they’re referred to as insulation. Semiconductors, like silicon, are not conductors , nor insulation. However we can make them conduct electricity under certain conditions.
The solar cells are composed from two silicon layers, each one having been doped or treated so that electricity can flow throughout it in a specific way. The lower layer has slightly less electrons because it is doped. This layer is called positively-type silicon, also known as p-type. It is filled with too many electrons, which is why it is negatively charged. To provide the layer with an excess of electrons, it is doped to the other direction. This is known as n-type and negative-type silicon. (Read more about semiconductors and doping in our articles on transistors and integrated circuits.
A barrier is formed by the interplay between two layers of n-type and silica of the p-type. This is the vital boundary where the two types of silicon meet. The barrier is not accessible to electrons so even if the silicon sandwich connects to a flashlight it won’t be able to flow current and the light bulb won’t be able to turn on. But, if you shine light on the sandwich, it will create some amazing results. The light can be considered as{ a|| an evaporation} streaming stream, or “light particles” that are energetic, referred to as photons. Photons entering the sandwich release their energy to the silicon atoms when they move through. The energy that is absorbed knocks electrons from the lower, p-type layer. They then cross and over the wall to the n-type above and move around the circuit. The greater the amount of light then the more electrons rise and more current will flow.
How efficient are Solar Panels?
The conservation energy law, a fundamental rule of physics, says that energy cannot be created or dissolved into thin air. We can only convert it from one form of energy to another. A solar cell cannot produce more electricity than it receives in light every second. We will discover that the majority of solar cells convert between 10 and 20 percent from the power they receive into electricity. The theoretical maximum efficiency of a one-junction solar cell is about 30 percent. This limit is known as the Shockley Queisser limitation. Because sunlight can be found in a vast spectrum of wavelengths and energies that a single-junction silicon solar cell can only be able to capture light within a limited frequency range. All other photons will go to waste. Some of the photons hitting the solar cell aren’t strong enough to create enough electrons. Some have too much energy and end up being wasted. In the best conditions, lab cells equipped with cutting-edge technology can attain just under 50 percent efficiency. They make use of multiple junctions to collect photons of different energies.
A real-world domestic panel might be able to achieve an efficiency of about 15 percent. Single-junctionsolar cells of the first generation aren’t able to reach the 30 percent efficiency threshold set by Shockley-Queisser, or the record set by the laboratory that is 47.1 percent. There are a myriad of factors that can affect the nominal efficiency of solar cells such as how they are constructed, angled and positioned, whether they are ever in shadow or not, their cleanliness and how cool they are.
Different types of Photovoltaic Cell
The majority of solar cells you will see today on rooftops are just silicon sandwiches. They’ve received the designation of “doped” to improve its electrical conductivity. These classic solar cells are called first-generation by scientists to distinguish them from the two newer technologies, second- and third-generation. What’s the difference?
First-generation Solar Cells
More than 90 percent of the world’s solar cells are made of wafers made up of crystallized silicon (abbreviated “c-Si”), which are sliced from large ingots. This process could take up to one month and is carried out in extremely clean laboratories. Ingots could be one crystal (monocrystalline solar panels) or multi-crystalline (polycrystalline solar panels), depending on whether they contain multiple crystals.
Solar cells of the first generation function the way we’ve shown them in the picture above. They make use of a simple connection between p-type and n-type layers of silicon. The latter is cut out of separate ingots. The n-type ingot is created by heating small pieces of silicon with small amounts (or antimony or phosphorus) as the dopant. In a p-type ingot, you would use boron. The junction is made by combining slices of p-type and the n-type silicon. There are a few extra bells and whistles which can add to the photovoltaic cell (like an antireflective layer which increases light absorption and makes them blue) and connections made of metal that allow them to be wired into circuits. A simple P-N junction is the most common solar cells are relying on. Photovoltaic solar cells function since 1954 when Bell Labs scientists pioneered it using sunlight to illuminate silicon sand, they generated electricity.
Second-generation Solar Cells
The classic solar cells have thin films of solar wafers. They’re usually only tiny fractions of millimeters thick (around 200 micrometers or 200mm). They’re not as thin than second generation solar cells (TPSC), or thin-film solar cells which are 100 times smaller (several millimeters, or millimeters of meters deep). Although the majority of them are still made of silicon (a type of silicon known as amorphous silu (a-Si)) that is where the atoms are placed in random crystalline structures, some are made out of different materials like Cd-Te, cadmium-telluride or copper indium gallium dielenide (CIGS).
The second generation cells are light and thin and can be laminated to skylights, windows or roof tiles. They also work well with all kinds of “substrates”, which are backers such as plastics and metals. Second-generation cells have less flexibility than the first generation ones, however they perform far better than them. The top first-generation cells can attain efficiency of around 15%, but amorphous silicon struggles to get higher than 7%) and the top thin-film CdTe cells manage only about 11 percent efficiency, with CIGS cells no better than 7-12%. This is one of the reasons why second-generation solar cells haven’t had much success in the marketplace despite their numerous advantages.
Third-generation Solar cells
These innovative technologies blend the best features of first- and 2nd generation cells. They are expected to have high efficiency (up to 30 percent) similar to first-generation cells. They tend to be composed of different materials as silicon (making second-generation photovoltaics (also known as OPVs) and perovskite crystals. They may also have multiple junctions (made up of several layers of different semiconducting materials). They would be more affordable and more efficient as well as feasible than first or second-generation cells. The{ current|| record-setting} global record of efficiency of third-generation solar cell is 28.1. This record was set in December 2018 by a tandem perovskite-silicon solar cell.
How are they made?
Like you see the seven steps in the process of creating solar cells.
Stage 1: Purify Silicon
Silicon dioxide gets heated by an electrical furnace. In order to release oxygen carbon arcs can be applied. It results in carbon dioxide, and then molten silicon, that can be used to make solar systems. Even though this yields silicon with only 1% impurity it’s not quite adequate enough. The floating zone method permits the silicon rods that are 99% pure to pass through a hot zone many at a time, in the direction of. The process eliminates all impurities from one end of the rod and allows it to be cleaned.
Second Stage: Making Single Crystal Silicon
The Czochralski method is the most well-known method for creating single-crystalline silicon. This involves placing a seed crystal made of silicon in melting silicon. This creates a boule or cylindrical ingot by turning the seed crystal when it is removed from the melted silicon.
Stage Three Make cuts in the Silicon Wafers
Second stage boules are used for cutting silicon wafers using circular saws. This job is best done by using diamonds, which produce pieces of silicon that could then be cut into squares or hexagons. Although cutting marks of the saw are eliminated from the slices, some companies keep them in place because they believe that more light could be captured by the rougher solar cells.
Stage 4: Doping
After cleaning the silicon at a earlier stage, it’s possible to incorporate impurities into the material. Doping involves the use of an accelerator that ignites the phosphorus ions within the ingot. It is possible to control the depth of penetration by controlling the speed of the electrons. You can skip this step by using the standard technique of inserting boron into processing the wafers.
Phase Five: Add electric contacts
The electrical contacts are used as a connection between the solar cells and serve as receivers for the generated current. These contacts, made of metals like palladium and copper, have a thin structure enough to allow sunlight to enter the solar cell effectively. The metal is either deposited on the exposed cells or vacuum evaporated using a photoresist. Tin-coated copper strips are typically placed between cells after the contacts are installed.
Step Six: Apply the Anti-Reflective Coating
Because silicon has a shiny appearance, it can reflect up to 35% sunlight. To reduce reflections, a coating of silicon will be put on it. This is done by heating the material until the molecules are boiling off. The molecules then move onto the silicon and begin to condense. The high voltage could also be used to eliminate the molecules, and then deposit them on the silicon at another electrode. This is known as “sputtering”.
Stage Seven Stage Seven: Seal and Encapsulate the Cell
The solar cells are then enclosed using silicon rubber or vinyl Acetate. Then, they are put in an aluminum frame that has a back sheet and glass cover.
What amount of electrical energy can solar cells produce?
Theoretically, it’s quite a bit. For the moment, let’s put aside solar cells and focus on the pure sun. Each square meter of Earth can receive up to 1100 watts of sun power. It is the expected energy of direct sunlight during a clear day. The solar rays are firing perpendicularly towards the Earth’s surface, giving maximum luminosity.
When we adjust for Earth’s tilt as well as the seasons we will achieve between 100-250 watts for each sq. meters in northern latitudes even on cloudless days. This translates to about 2-6 kWh per daily. Multiplying the entire year’s production results in 700-2500 kWh per sq. m (700-2500 units) of electricity. The solar energy potential in warmer regions is evidently higher than Europe. For instance the Middle East receives between 50 to 100 percent more solar energy each season than Europe.
The problem is that solar cells are only around 15 percent efficient. This means that we only get 4-10 watts per square foot. This is why panels with solar power should be huge in size. The amount of area the area you can cover by cells will affect the power that you can produce. The typical solar panel consisting with 40 solar cells (each row of eight cells) will produce about 3-4.5 watts. However, a solar panel comprised of 3-4 modules can generate several kilowatts. This is enough to power a home’s peak energy needs.
How about Solar Panel Farms?
But, what happens if we need to generate massive amounts of solar power? You will need between 500 and 1000 solar roofs to produce approximately the same quantity of power as a wind turbine that has an output peak of 2 or 3 megawatts. In order to compete with huge nuclear or coal power plants (rated as gigawatts), you would need approximately 1,000 solar roofing systems. This is roughly 2000 wind turbines and perhaps one million. The calculations assume that solar and wind produce maximum output. Even though solar cells can produce clean, efficient power, they cannot claim to be effective use of land. Even the huge solar farms that are being built across the country generate only a small amount of power, typically about 20 megawatts or 1 per cent less than a large 2 gigawatt nuclear or coal plant. Shneyder Solar, a renewable company, estimates that it takes around 22,000 solar panels to cover 12 ha (30-acres) area to produce 4.2 megawatts. It’s about the same that two wind turbines with large capacities. The turbine also produces enough power to power 1,200 homes.
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