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Nanoscience and Nanotechnology

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Purdue University

Photovoltaics

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Full-Text Articles in Engineering

Predicting And Optimizing Solar Cell Performance With Material/Surface Characteristics, Yiheng Zhu, Allison Perna, Peter Bermel Aug 2018

Predicting And Optimizing Solar Cell Performance With Material/Surface Characteristics, Yiheng Zhu, Allison Perna, Peter Bermel

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Renewable energy sources have begun replacing fossil fuels at the utility scale. In particular, photovoltaics has grown rapidly in recent years. To further improve solar technology in terms of cost and efficiency and promote adoption, researchers often seek material and device level advancements. Photovoltaic simulation tools can be utilized to predict device performance before fabrication and experimentation, streamline research processes, and interpret experimental results. Therefore, we developed ContourPV, which simulates various combinations of values of different device characteristics to optimize and predict photovoltaic performance. ContourPV sweeps the inputted range of values for each chosen device or layer characteristic and obtains …


Performance Of Tf-Vls Grown Inp Photovoltaic Cells, Junyan Shi, Yubo Sun, Peter Bermel Aug 2016

Performance Of Tf-Vls Grown Inp Photovoltaic Cells, Junyan Shi, Yubo Sun, Peter Bermel

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

A grand challenge of photovoltaics (PV) is to find materials offering a promising combination of low costs and high efficiencies. While III-V material-based PV cells have set many world records, often their cost is much greater than other commercial cells. To help address this gap, thin-film vapor-liquid-solid (TF-VLS) grown Indium Phosphide (InP) PV cells have recently been developed, which both eliminate a key source of high costs and offer a direct bandgap of 1.34eV with potential to approach maximum theoretical efficiencies. However, the unanticipated phenomenon of open circuit voltage (Voc) degradation has prevented TF-VLS grown InP PV cells …


The Development Of 6.7% Efficient Copper Zinc Indium Selenide Devices From Copper Zinc Indium Sulfide Nanocrystal Inks, Brian Kemp Graeser Apr 2014

The Development Of 6.7% Efficient Copper Zinc Indium Selenide Devices From Copper Zinc Indium Sulfide Nanocrystal Inks, Brian Kemp Graeser

Open Access Theses

As solar cell absorber materials, alloys of CuIn(S,Se)2 and Zn(S,Se) provide an opportunity to reduce the usage of indium along with the ability to tune the band gap. Here we report successful synthesis of alloyed (CuInS2 )0.5(ZnS)0.5 nanocrystals by a method that solely uses oleylamine as the liquid medium for synthesis. The reactive sintering of a thin film of these nanocrystals via selenization at 500 °C results in a uniform composition alloy (CuIn(S,Se)2 )0.5 (Zn(S,Se)) 0.5 layer with micron size grains. Due to the large amount of zinc in the film, the sintered grains exhibit the zinc blende structure instead …