Collector materials production cost

Economics. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has estimated that In order to be cost-effective, the Installed system price for residential photovoltaic systems In 1986 must be 1.60 to 2.20 per peak watt. In 1980 dollars. Of this, 0.80 per peak watt Is applied to the photovoltaic collector Itself. Typical costs for current photovoltaic systems are 20.00 per peak watt, of which 10.50 per peak watt Is allocated to the collector.( 1) Although strides are being made In the development of singlecrystal silicon photovoltaic devices, the potential for their low-cost manufacture remains an open question. The need to search for other materials which may result In cost-effective devices Is evident. The economic attraction of an organic polymer-based photovoltaic device Is Its use of small amounts of Inexpensive material and Its suitability for mass production. 

The analysis of carbon materials used as catalyst support, gas diffusion layer, and current collector and bipolar plates is performed in Chap. 7. A number of carbon materials including carbon blacks, nanotubes, nanofibers, and structured porous carbon materials are analyzed and compared as catalyst support in direct methanol fuel cells. Commercial and non-commercial gas diffusion layers are described along with the role of the mesoporous layer on the fuel cell performance. Finally, synthetic graphite and carbon composites used as current collector and bipolar plates are discussed, focusing on their mechanical and electrical properties and production costs. 

Manufacturers are seeking to reduce production costs of batteries by developing less costly electrode-manufacturing processes. Today, electrodes are made by deposition/coating of powders dispersed in an organic or aqueous solvent (for positive materials) onto metal current collectors. Research efforts have turned toward printing techniques from the paper industry, whereby very thin films of active materials can be very precisely deposited to make thin and soft batteries." The intended applications are applications for which it is necessary to have batteries with small... 

If the product in no way adheres to the dryer parts and simple cyclone collectors are sufficient for gas-sohds separation, batch operation of a spray dryer may be considered. Otherwise, the time and costs for cleaning the large equipment parts make them rarely economical for other than continuous processing of a single material. 

The interfaces of importance in SECS are the solid/solid (S/S), solid/gas (S/G), and solid/ liquid (S/L) (4). The area-intensive nature of SECS components was established in the previous section. The major problem is collecting solar energy at a cost that is competitive with other energy forms. Thus, low initial cost is required for the materials, support structures, and production processes in the SECS of interest in Fig. 1 (6). This requires, for example, using thin films in mirrors, in photovoltaic systems, for antireflection coatings on windows, for passive collection, etc. in addition, these films must be made from inexpensive, durable, and easily processed materials (5). Inexpensive long-life materials in flat-plate collectors and durable, stable absorber coatings are also necessary. 

All prior donations from donor who retrospectively provides this information must be recalled and any fractionated products destroyed. If plasma collector shipped the material in error, it will bear cost (fractionator dependent). This could cost millions of dollars, depending on the time frames and numbers of products affected. 

Another area of development is in lower-cost thin- and ultrathin-film designs. One such product is made by Nanosolar of copper indium gallium selenide (CIGS), which is claimed to achieve up to 19.5% efficiency and is as thin as a newspaper. This claim is yet to be proved. The collector cost is also reduced, because the substrate material on which the ink is printed is much less expensive than the stainless steel substrates that are often used in thin-film solar panels. The manufacturer claims a five- to tenfold reduction in the collector cost (about 1/W) compared to conventional PV cells. 

The fuel used to make solar-hydrogen is free (sunshine) and unlimited, the raw material for H2 is water, and the emission when burning the H2 in fuel cells, internal combustion engines, or in power plants is distilled water. The cost of building the solar-hydrogen plants will be known once the demonstration power plant described in this book is built. It might turn out that this cost is already competitive but whatever it is, we know that it will drop by an order of magnitude when the mass production of ultrathin-film solar collectors and reversible fuel cells is started. 

Abstract. Usual plate solar collectors, based on a metal absorber (Cu, Al) selectively coated are technologically very sophisticated, expensive to produce and they are great consumer of fossil raw material. Polymeric materials are considered as a promising alternative for many interesting properties easy moldability, corrosion resistance, they also offer a significant cost-reduction for solar thermal collectors, and a mass production may thus benefit to a broader utilization of solar energy. Most drawbacks of polymers are their low thermal properties essentially thermal conductivity coefficient may strongly affect the solar absorber efficiency and deteriorate the collector performance. 

---