Currently, the energy shortage is a severe problem for every country. The world is facing the energy revolution to convert the energy resource from the traditional fossil fuel (coals, oil etc..) to the renewable energy like wind energy and solar energy. However, the solar technology still meets some challenges which include the cell’s efficiency and unstable. The first one is more about the substrate and layer properties, and the cell’s structure and the other one is due to the solar energy depend on the weather condition. (will improve by the size of capacity)
For my side act as an engineer, I’m working on come over the trouble for the efficiency limit of PERC cell which is the most common one used in the industrial flowline. To increase the selective of the carriers and overcome the recombination rate, the carrier selective contact is one of the solutions for that. As for hole selective contact, there exists a transitional metal oxide layer applied near the conduction band act as a barrier to prevent the e-h pairs recombination and improve the cell’s performance.
Therefore, the stability for TMO layer is essential elements for cell’s efficiency. The later steps in the screen-printing line like metallization, coating and drying require high temperature which may cause the properties to change of TMO layer. To detect that, I choose my 4th-year thesis topic (Temperature dependent spectroscopic ellipsometry measurement of transition metal oxide) from Bram Hoex and mainly focus on three kinds of material: MoOx, NiOx and WOx.
Besides of that, good communication and writing skills are also being helpful for us. Especially for the international students, we need to train that for our thesis report and team operation performance. I believe that I have the academic ability, interest and personal attributes that are well suited to studying solar engineering at university and to pursue a career in this field.