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Full-Text Articles in Engineering
Using Berries To Turn Sunlight Into Electricity: Taking Advice From Mother Nature Because She Has Already Mastered The Art Of Using Solar Energy, Quincy Ross
Senior Projects Spring 2023
As we try to stop anthropogenic climate change, we need to find energy sources that don’t involve burning fossil fuels. The Earth is constantly being hit with energy in the form of sunlight, we just need to figure out how to use it, thankfully plants have already gotten very good at photosynthesis. Solar energy is being improved at an exciting rate but has some material downsides when it comes to raw material mining. Dye sensitized solar cells, though having a lower efficiency than traditional photovoltaics open up opportunities for improving solar energy in many other aspects, such as reducing material …
Photovoltaics: An Investigation Into The Origins Of Efficiency On All Scales, Jeremy Alexander Bannister
Photovoltaics: An Investigation Into The Origins Of Efficiency On All Scales, Jeremy Alexander Bannister
Senior Projects Spring 2016
This project is comprised of a set of parallel investigations, which share the common mo- tivation of increasing the efficiency of photovoltaics. First, the reader is introduced to core concepts of photovoltaic energy conversion via a semi-classical description of the phys- ical system. Second, a key player in photovoltaic efficiency calculations, the exciton, is discussed in greater quantum mechanical detail. The reader will be taken through a nu- merical derivation of the low-energy exciton states in various geometries, including a line segment, a circle and a sphere. These numerical calculations are done using Mathematica, a computer program which, due to …