Wednesday, March 16, 2011

A brief history on solar cells and the generations of solar cell manufacturing today

Solar cells grew out of the 1839 discovery of the photovoltaic effect by French physicist A. E. Becquerel. However, it was not until 1883 that the first solar cell was built, by Charles Fritts, who coated the semiconductor selenium with an extremely thin layer of gold to form the junctions. The device was only about 1 percent efficient. Subsequently Russian physicist Aleksandr Stoletov built 
the first solar cell based on the outer photoelectric effect (discovered by Heinrich Hertz earlier in 1887). Albert Einstein explained the photoelectric effect in 1905 for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921. Russell Ohl, working on the series of advances that would lead to the transistor, developed and patented the junction semiconductor solar cell in 1946.  Thin film solar cell annealing furnace. Today’s solar cells can be described as the co-existence of three different generations: crystalline silicon, thin film, and dye. Along with the development of solar cells, there has also been a parallel development of solar cell manufacturing technologies. Assembly and packaging engineers have played a significant role in developing these manufacturing techniques, creating incredible potentials in every generation of the solar business. 

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