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Nonactive solar materials make a difference

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Anne L. Fischer, Senior Editor, [email protected]

In the never-ending quest to lower costs and boost efficiency in solar modules, attention is focused on the active-layer materials such as silicon wafers or copper indium gallium selenide thin films. Nonactive materials, however, can account for nearly half of the module materials cost, and, thus, interest is turning to the development of lower cost/higher efficiency materials such as encapsulants, metallization, antireflection coatings and transparent conducting oxides. In the report Driving Down Solar Costs: Non-active Material Opportunities by Lux Research Inc. of Boston, analysts...Read full article

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    Published: December 2009
    Glossary
    efficiency
    As applied to a device or machine, the ratio of total power input to the usable power output of the device.
    glass
    A noncrystalline, inorganic mixture of various metallic oxides fused by heating with glassifiers such as silica, or boric or phosphoric oxides. Common window or bottle glass is a mixture of soda, lime and sand, melted and cast, rolled or blown to shape. Most glasses are transparent in the visible spectrum and up to about 2.5 µm in the infrared, but some are opaque such as natural obsidian; these are, nevertheless, useful as mirror blanks. Traces of some elements such as cobalt, copper and...
    thin film
    A thin layer of a substance deposited on an insulating base in a vacuum by a microelectronic process. Thin films are most commonly used for antireflection, achromatic beamsplitters, color filters, narrow passband filters, semitransparent mirrors, heat control filters, high reflectivity mirrors, polarizers and reflection filters.
    aerosol jet printingAlbuquerqueAnne L. Fischeranti-reflection coatingBostonCoatingscopper indum gallium selenideCrystalline Silicondollar-per-WattDresdendurabilityefficiencyencapsulantsenergyFraunhofer Institute for Ceramic Technologies and SystemsGermanyglassGreenLightgrid linesindustrialinkjet printingIsraelJohanna SchmidtkeLux ResearchMaterialsmetallizationmoneyNew MexicoOptomecperformancescreen printingsilicon waferssolarthin filmtransparent conducting oxideswarrantyXJet

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