Although silicon is actually the industry standard semiconductor in almost all electronic products, including the pv cells that sun panels utilize to convert sun rays into energy, it is not really the most cost-efficient material available. For example, the semiconductor gallium arsenide and similar substance semiconductors provide nearly double the efficiency as silicon in solar units, yet they are rarely utilized in utility-scale applications because of their excessive production price.

U. of I. (http://illinois.edu/) teachers J. Rogers and X. Li investigated lower-cost techniques to produce thin films of gallium arsenide which also granted flexibility in the types of devices they could be incorporated into.If you can minimize significantly the cost of gallium arsenide and some other compound semiconductors, then you could develop their variety of applications.

Generally, gallium arsenide is transferred in a individual thin layer on a smaller wafer. Either the desired device is produced directly on the wafer, or the semiconductor-coated wafer is break up into chips of the ideal size. The Illinois team made the decision to put in several layers of the material on a simple wafer, creating a layered, “pancake” stack of gallium arsenide thin films.

If you increase ten levels in 1 growth, you only have to load the wafer one time. If you do this in 10 growths, loading and unloading with heat range ramp-up and ramp-down get a lot of time. If you take into account what is necessary for each growth – the equipment, the research, the period, the workers – the overhead saving this solution offers is a significant expense reduction.

Next the researchers separately peel off the levels and move them. To achieve this, the stacks swap levels of aluminum arsenide with the gallium arsenide. Bathing the stacks in a formula of acid and an oxidizing agent dissolves the layers of aluminum arsenide, freeing the single thin sheets of gallium arsenide. A soft stamp-like system selects up the layers, one at a time from the top down, for shift to another substrate – glass, plastic-type or silicon, based on the application. Then the wafer could be reused for an additional growth.

By executing this it's possible to create significantly more material a lot more rapidly and much more cost efficiently. This process could create bulk amounts of material, as opposed to merely the thin single-layer manner in which it is usually grown.

Freeing the material from the wafer also opens the possibility of flexible, thin-film electronics produced with gallium arsenide or some other high-speed semiconductors. To make devices that can conform but still retain high efficiency, that’s considerable.

In a document released online May twenty in the publication Nature (http://www.nature.com/), the group details its procedures and demonstrates 3 types of products using gallium arsenide chips manufactured in multilayer stacks: light devices, high-speed transistors and photo voltaic cells. The authors also supply a detailed price evaluation.

An additional advantage of the multilayer approach is the release from area constraints, particularly essential for photo voltaic cells. As the levels are eliminated from the stack, they may be laid out side-by-side on another substrate in order to produce a significantly larger surface area, whereas the typical single-layer procedure confines area to the size of the wafer.

For solar panels, you need large area coverage to catch as much

sunshine as possible. In an extreme case we may increase sufficient levels to have ten times the area of the traditional.

Up coming, the team plans to investigate more prospective device applications and additional semiconductor resources that could adapt to multilayer growth.

About the Publisher - Shannon Combs gives advice for the

residential solar power products blog site, her personal hobby blog based on suggestions to assist home owners to save energy with solar power.

Photos:

http://www.residentialsolarpanels.org/thin_film_solar.jpg

http://www.residentialsolarpanels.org/solar_arsenium.jp

Complete Bio Photo of the Author

http://www.residentialsolarpanels.org/about

http://www.residentialsolarpanels.org/files/photos/shannon.jpg