The School of Photovoltaic and Renewable Energy Engineering at Sydney, Australia based University of New South Wales (UNSW) has joined hands with Chinese cell machinery maker Leadmicro. The two plan to develop next generation of silicon solar cells and the technology for their mass production.
Having gifted to the world PERC technology developed at the university under Prof Martin Green in the late 1980s, UNSW now wants to further improve the efficiency of PERC cells. Currently, these have a potential conversion rate of sunlight into electricity of 25% according to UNSW, while most solar panels installed today use traditional cell technology with conversion rate of about 20%.
The UNSW-Leadmicro team will use Atomic Layer Deposition (ALD) technique to construct ultra-thin layers of films to produce PERC cells, building nanoscopic-thin films within the cells one atomic layer at a time. Through this process, they hope to increase the potential efficiency of silicon solar cells to more than 27%.
"While it may sound like a modest increase in efficiency, this would be an 8% relative increase, which is likely to be achieved without a significant increase in costs, thus further reducing the overall cost of solar electricity," explained UNSW project lead, Associate Professor Bram Hoex.
Leadmicro will donate a $1 million ALD reactor as its contribution to the project to help UNSW quickly produce the improved silicon solar cells in a small-scale laboratory setting, before they can be adapted for commercial application. The ALD reactor will be installed at UNSW's Solar Industrial Research Facility in Kensington by March 2019 with the plan to having the 'next generation' PERC solar cells in production in late 2019.
The Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) is supporting the research with a grant. TaiyangNews 2018 edition of its annual PERC report focuses on 'PERC+: How to improve high-efficiency crystalline solar cells'