Novel low-cost nano-silicon solar cells

The main concept of this project is to develop a solar cell with a radically lower cost per watt than current thin film state-of-the-art technology. This project will lay the groundwork for a new technology with a potentially very large impact on the PV m arket. The underlying benefits of the cell concept that will be studied is the substantial reduction in production cost as well as energy consumption during production due to the possibility of roll-to-roll printing, atmospheric processing and low materia l consumption as well as high material utilization compared to both wafer based and thin film based PV technologies currently available. The key innovations are primarily related to the way the different layers of the cell are deposited. The overall aim of the R&D effort is to achieve a fundamental understanding of the materials, deposition methods and corresponding cell design that are part of this novel concept.