Renewable Energy Sources

MET404
 Poly-Crystalline Cells
• Poly Silicon is high purity polycrystalline form of
Silicon,
• Used as a raw material by solar PV and electronic
industry,
• It is produced from metallurgical grade silicon by a
chemical process known as SIEMENS PROCESS,
• It involves distillation of volatile silicon compounds,
and their decomposition into silicon at high
temperatures.
• Polysilicon contains impurity levels of less than one
part per billion (ppb).

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 Poly-Crystalline Cells
• Polysilicon consists of small crystals, also known as
crystallites, giving the material its typical metal flake
effect.
• While polysilicon and multisilicon are often used as
synonyms, multicrystalline usually refers to crystalls
larger than 1 mm.
• Multicrystalline solar cells are the most common type of
solar cells in the fast-growing PV market and consume
most of the worldwide produced polysilicon.
• About 5 tons of polysilicon is required to manufacture 1
megawatt (MW) of conventional solar modules.

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 Poly-Crystalline Cells
• The polysilicon feedstock (large rods), usually broken
into chunks of specific sizes and packaged in clean
rooms before shipment.
• It is directly cast into multicrystalline ingots or
submitted to a recrystallization process to grow single
crystal boules.
• The products are then sliced into thin silicon wafers
and used for the production of solar cells, integrated
circuits and other semiconductor devices.

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 Poly-Crystalline PV Cells

Left side: solar cells made of multi crystalline silicon

Right side: polysilicon rod (top) and chunks (bottom)
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 Mono-Crystalline Cells
• In monocrystalline silicon, the crystalline framework
is homogenous,
• This can be recognized by an external colouring.
• The entire sample is one single, continuous and
unbroken crystal as its structure contains no grain
boundaries.
• Large single crystals are rare in nature and can also
be difficult to produce in the laboratory.

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 Poly and Mono Crystalline PV Cells

Left side: polycrystalline solar cells

Right side: monocrystalline solar cells
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 Polysilicon Deposition
• The process of depositing a layer of polycrystalline
silicon on a semiconductor wafer,
• It is achieved by the chemical decomposition of
silane (SiH4) at high temperatures of 580 to 650 °C.
• Polysilicon layers can be deposited using 100% silane
at a pressure of 25–130 Pa (0.19–0.98 Torr) or with
20–30% silane (diluted in nitrogen) at the same total
pressure.
• Critical process variables for polysilicon deposition
include temperature, pressure, silane concentration,
and dopant concentration.

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 Upgraded Metallurgical Grade Silicon
• Upgraded metallurgical-grade (UMG) silicon (also known
as UMG-Si) solar cell is being produced as a low cost
alternative to polysilicon created by the Siemens process,
• UMG-Si greatly reduces impurities in a variety of ways
that require less equipment and energy than the Siemens
process.
• It is about 99% pure which is three or more orders of
magnitude less pure and about 10 times less expensive
than polysilicon.
• It has the potential to provide nearly-as-good solar cell
efficiency at 1/5 the capital expenditure, half the energy
requirements, and less than $15/kg.

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 Poly and Mono Crystalline PV Cells

History of polysilicon spot prices

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 Thin Film Solar Cell
• A thin-film solar cell is a second generation solar
cell that is made by depositing one or more thin
layers, or thin film (TF) of photovoltaic material on a
substrate, such as glass, plastic or metal.
• The conventional, first-generation crystalline silicon
solar cell (c-Si), that uses wafers of up to 200 µm.
• Film thickness varies from a few nanometers (nm) to
tens of micrometers (µm).
• This allows thin film cells to be flexible, lower in
weight, and have less drag or friction.

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 Thin Film Solar Cell
• It is used in building integrated photovoltaics and as
semi-transparent, photovoltaic glazing material that
can be laminated onto windows.
• The lab cell efficiency for CdTe and CIGS is now
beyond 21 percent, outperforming multicrystalline
silicon, the dominant material currently used in most
solar PV systems.
• Thin-film solar cells are commercially using
cadmium telluride (CdTe), copper indium gallium
diselenide (CIGS), and amorphous thin-film silicon
(a-Si, TF-Si).

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 Amorphous Silicon Thin Film Solar Cell
• Amorphous silicon (a-Si) is a non-crystalline,
allotropic form of silicon and the most well-
developed thin film technology to-date.
• It is mostly fabricated by plasma-enhanced chemical
vapor deposition technique.
• In this technique, a gaseous mixture of silane (SiH4)
and hydrogen to deposit a very thin layer of only 1
micrometre (µm) of silicon on a substrate, such as
glass, plastic or metal, that has already been coated
with a layer of transparent conducting oxide.

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 a-Si Thin Film Solar Cell: Benefits
• Due to its bandgap of 1.7 eV, amorphous silicon also
absorbs a very broad range of the light spectrum, that
includes infrared and even some ultraviolet and
performs very well at weak light.

• This allows the cell to generate power in the early

morning, or late afternoon and on cloudy and rainy
days, contrary to crystalline silicon cells, that are
significantly less efficient when exposed at diffuse
and indirect daylight.

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 Multi Junction Solar Cells
• Multi-junction (MJ) solar cells are solar cells with
multiple p–n junctions made of different
semiconductor materials.

• Each material's p-n junction will produce electric

current in response to different wavelengths of light.

• The use of multiple semiconducting materials allows

the absorbance of a broader range of wavelengths,
improving the cell's sunlight to electrical energy
conversion efficiency.

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 Multi Junction Solar Cells
• Traditional crystalline silicon solar cells have efficiencies
between 20% and 25%,
• Lab examples of multi-junction cells have demonstrated
performance over 46% under concentrated sunlight.
• However, this efficiency is gained at the cost of increased
complexity and manufacturing price.
• To date, their higher price and higher price-to-
performance ratio have limited their use to special roles,
notably in aerospace where their high power-to-weight
ratio is desirable.
• In terrestrial applications, these solar cells are emerging in
concentrator photovoltaics (CPV), with a growing
number of installations around the world.

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 Loss Mechanisms in PV Cell
1. Blackbody radiation: a loss mechanism that affects any
material object above absolute zero. In the case of solar
cells at standard temperature and pressure, this loss
accounts for about 7% of the power.
2. Recombination: The electrons created by the
photoelectric effect meet the electron holes left behind
by previous excitations. In silicon, this accounts for
another 10% of the power.
3. Inability of a solar cell to extract all of the power in the
photon, and the associated problem that it cannot extract
any power at all from certain photons. This is due to the
fact that the photons must have enough energy to
overcome the bandgap of the material.
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 Loss Mechanisms in PV Cell
• If the photon has less energy than the bandgap, it is not
collected at all. This is a major consideration for
conventional solar cells, which are not sensitive to most
of the infrared spectrum, although that represents almost
half of the power coming from the sun.
• Conversely, photons with more energy than the bandgap,
say blue light, initially eject an electron to a state high
above the bandgap, but this extra energy is lost through
collisions in a process known as "relaxation".
• This lost energy turns into heat in the cell, which has the
side-effect of further increasing blackbody losses.

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 Loss Mechanisms in PV Cell
• Combining all of these factors, the maximum
efficiency for a single-bandgap material, like
conventional silicon cells, is about 34%.

• That is, 66% of the energy in the sunlight hitting the

cell will be lost.

• Practical concerns further reduce this, notably

reflection off the front surface or the metal terminals,
with modern high-quality cells at about 22%

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 Multi Junction Solar Cells
• Cells made from multiple materials have multiple bandgaps.

• So, it will respond to multiple light wavelengths and some of

the energy that would otherwise be lost to relaxation as
described above, can be captured and converted.

• Producing a MJ solar cell is not an easy task, largely due to the

thinness of the materials and the difficulties extracting the
current between the layers.

• The easy solution is to use two mechanically separate thin film

solar cells and then wire them together separately outside the
cell.

• This technique is widely used by amorphous silicon solar cells

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 Multi Junction Solar Cells
• The more difficult solution is the "monolithically integrated"
cell, where the cell consists of a number of layers that are
mechanically and electrically connected.

• These cells are much more difficult to produce because the

electrical characteristics of each layer has to be carefully
matched.

• In particular, the photocurrent generated in each layer needs to

be matched, otherwise electrons will be absorbed between
layers

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 References
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polycrystalline_silicon

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thin-film_solar_cell

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-
junction_solar_cell

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 Thank You

Dr. M Mohan Jagadeesh Kumar

Assistant Professor
MNIT Jaipur