Solar diffuse

When sunlight falls on a p—n junction solar cell while it is short-circuited, the magnitude of remains essentially the same as it was in darkness. Because the diffusion of majority current only varies with lA, the majority current does not change. However, additional minority carriers are formed by... 

When the temperature of a solar cell rises, cell conversion efficiency decreases because the additional thermal energy increases the thermally generated minority (dark-drift) current. This increase in dark-drift current is balanced in the cell by lowering the built-in barrier potential, lU, to boost the majority diffusion current. The drop in F causes a decrease in and F. Therefore, a cell s output, ie, the product of F and decreases with increasing cell temperature. is less sensitive to temperature changes than F and actually increases with temperature. 

Electrically Functional. Refractory coatings are used in semiconductor devices, capacitors, resistors, magnetic tape, disk memories, superconductors, solar ceUs, and diffusion barriers to impurity contamination from the substrate to the active layer. 

Global AMI.5 sun illumination of intensity 100 mW/cm ). The DOS (or defect) is found to be low with a dangling bond (DB) density, as measured by electron spin resonance (esr) of - 10 cm . The inherent disorder possessed by these materials manifests itself as band tails which emanate from the conduction and valence bands and are characterized by exponential tails with an energy of 25 and 45 meV, respectively the broader tail from the valence band provides for dispersive transport (shallow defect controlled) for holes with alow drift mobiUty of 10 cm /(s-V), whereas electrons exhibit nondispersive transport behavior with a higher mobiUty of - 1 cm /(s-V). Hence the material exhibits poor minority (hole) carrier transport with a diffusion length <0.5 //m, which puts a design limitation on electronic devices such as solar cells. 

Unlike solar thermal systems or PV concentrator systems, the PV flat plate systems work well in cloudy locations because these latter convert diffuse as well as direct sunlight to electricity. On an aimualized basis, the energy produced by a photovoltaic array varies by only about 25% from an average value for the contiguous 48 states of the United States. As a result, it is practical to use photovoltaic systems in normally cloudy locations such as Seattle or northern Maine. 

Tritium has also been observed in meteorites and material recovered from sateUites (see also Extraterrestrial materials). The tritium activity in meteorites can be reasonably well explained by the interaction of cosmic-ray particles and meteoritic material. The tritium contents of recovered sateUite materials have not in general agreed with predictions based on cosmic-ray exposure. Eor observations higher than those predicted (Discoverer XVII and sateUites), a theory of exposure to incident tritium flux in solar flares has been proposed. Eor observations lower than predicted (Sputnik 4), the suggested explanation is a diffusive loss of tritium during heating up on reentry. 

The vertical temperature gradient (the lapse rate) is usually not monitored by routine meteorological observation, and it, too, must be approximated from estimates of solar insolation, solar angle, and differential heating due to uneven cloud cover. For purposes of diffusion analyses, the lapse rate is usually approximated by a constant. 

FIGURE 11.31 Radiaiion fluxes at the buildirtg facade the solar radiation components (direct or beam, diffuse, and reflected radiation from the ground or other buildings) and the components of the radiation back from the building facade (reflected solar and thermal infrared radiation from the building envelope). 

T he total or global solar radiation has a direct part (beam radiation) and a diffuse part (Fig. 11.31). In the simulation, solar radiation input values must be converted to radiation values for each surface of the building. For nonhorizontal surfaces, the diffuse radiation is composed of (a) the contribution from the diffuse sky and (b) reflections from the ground. The diffuse sky radiation is not uniform. It is composed of three parts, referred to as isotropic, circumsolar, and horizontal brightening. Several diffuse sky models are available. Depending on the model used, discrepancies for the boundary conditions may occur with the same basic set of solar radiation data, thus leading to differences in the simulation results. 

In thermal building-dynamics simulation codes, outdoor conditions are mostly input by the so-called weather data file, containing (usually hourly) data for air temperature, wind speed and direction, air humidity, and global and diffuse solar radiation on horizontal surfaces. 

A solar pond does not concentrate solar radiation, hut collects solar energy in the pond s water by absorbing both the direct and diffuse components of sunlight. Solar ponds contain salt in high concentrations near the bottom, with decreasing concentrations closer to the surface. This variation in concentration, known as a salt-density gradient, suppresses the natural tendency of hot water to rise, thus... 

Once the silicon disc is cleaned, the first step is diffuse ions into either side of the silieon disc to first form either the p-layer or the n-layer. Some manufacturers like to have the n-layer closer to the light source, as shown in the above diagram, while others prefer the opposite. At any rate, ions like and are generally used to form the active electrical layers. A number of differing processes have been developed to do this, the exact nature of which depending upon the speeific manufacturer of solar cells. Sputtering, vapor-phase and evaporation are used. The most common process uses a volatile boron or phosphorous compound to contact the surface. 

In the presence of an electric field the drift length is the mobility-lifetime product times the electric field A.mfp = prE [576]. With typical values of pz and E the mean free path usually exceeds by far the thickness of the solar cell, and virtually all photogenerated carriers can be collected. However, under certain operating conditions, field-free regions in the / -layer may exist, and the collection efficiency is decreased because the diffusion lengths of the carriers are much smaller than the thickness of the solar cell [11, 577]. 

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