Date of Award

1-1-2009

Document Type

Masters Thesis

Degree Name

M.S.

Organizational Unit

Daniel Felix Ritchie School of Engineering and Computer Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering

First Advisor

Siavash Pourkamali Anaraki, Ph.D.

Keywords

Micro-particles, Photovoltaics, Solar cells, Solar energy

Abstract

The relatively high cost of the high quality semiconductor materials (typically silicon) and complex conventional techniques for the fabrication of solar cells result in the overall high cost of the commercially available solar cells. Although, research in the field of solar technologies has been going on for a long time, but, utilization of solar energy still remains limited to a very few applications, owing to the high manufacturing costs and lower efficiency. In this work we present a new solar technology based on silicon photovoltaic micro-particles and demonstrate a fabrication technique for such particles. The photovoltaic micro-particles can be manufactured from waste or low grade silicon, thus, keeping the material and manufacturing costs low. Different diffusion techniques have been explored in this work to implement this fabrication process and manufacture the most efficient silicon PV particles. Different sets of silicon PV particles of different sizes have been fabricated, tested, and compared. It has also been demonstrated, how these silicon photovoltaic particles can be used to generate hydrogen from electrolytic solutions. Some future applications have also been proposed, such as, micro-particles based photo-electrochemical hydrogen generation system, self-assembled micro-particle based thin solar cells, and solar spray-paint. Further research in the growth of this technology may give rise to a whole new revolutionary solar cell technology.

Publication Statement

Copyright is held by the author. User is responsible for all copyright compliance.

Rights Holder

Siddhartha Kala

Provenance

Received from ProQuest

File Format

application/pdf

Language

en

File Size

102 p.

Discipline

Electrical engineering



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