Perovskite films are excellent light absorbers and are much cheaper to make
than the silicon wafers used in standard solar cells.
Not exact matches
And the U.S. may yet do more: 1366 is working on a machine roughly the size of a dishwasher that will convert molten pure
silicon directly into
wafers for photovoltaics, rather
than employing the process of sawing
wafers from purified
silicon logs as is commonly done today.
Rather
than making transistors from conventional
silicon wafers, they slice the material into sheets several times thinner
than a human hair.
Moreover, the process required temperatures no higher
than 120 °C, compared with many hundreds of degrees on a typical
silicon wafer fabrication line, the team reports in ACS Nano.
For instance, the Lexington, Mass. — based 1366 Technologies received funds to develop its «monocrystalline equivalent»
wafers that are formed directly from melted
silicon rather
than sawed from a block, which wastes as much as half of the semiconducting material.
The researchers had success in applying their technique to exotic
wafer and semiconducting materials, including indium phosphide, gallium arsenenide, and gallium phosphide — materials that are 50 to 100 times more expensive
than silicon.
The idea is that the film, when applied to different surfaces such as glass or brick, can produce solar energy more efficiently
than conventional
silicon wafer — based solar cells — which are made of materials similar to those used to fabricate computer chips.
Using a novel microscope that combines standard through - the - lens viewing with a technique called scatterfield imaging, the NIST team accurately measured patterned features on a
silicon wafer that were 30 times smaller
than the wavelength of light (450 nanometers) used to examine them.
It is even more automatizable to produce integrated circuits,
than mechanical parts, as instead of doing precision engineering for joining together moving mechanical parts, you will only cut a
silicon wafer!
SunPower claim they are starting production of
silicon wafer chips with 23 % efficiency, but for more
than $ 1 / w.