[BNC-grads-list] Preliminary exam tomorrow

[Raghu Vamsi Chavali]

Dear all:
I would like to invite you for my preliminary examination (or free 
coffee and snacks).

Date: November 20th, 2014
Time: 3:30 PM
Venue: Wang 1004

Title: Fundamental and Practical Limits of Heterojunction Solar Cells

Abstract:
The large-scale deployment of PV technology is very sensitive to the 
material and process costs. There are several potential candidates of 
p-n heterojunction (HJ) solar cells competing for higher efficiencies 
with lower material and process costs. However, these systems are 
generally more complex, involve diverse material systems and are not as 
well understood. Often, the direct translation of classical p-n 
homojunction theory to understand a p-n HJ system, causes 
misinterpretation, suffers from lack of self-consistency and ultimately 
renders it useless for modeling and characterization of these solar 
cells. Hence, there is a strong need to redefine/reinterpret the 
modeling and characterization of HJ solar cells, which would lead to a 
material system independent and self-consistent framework.

Towards this goal, we explore the physics, interpret characterization 
experiments of p-n HJs, using Silicon HJ (HIT) solar cell. In this work, 
we will (1) identify the technology bottlenecks, (2) provide a 
self-consistent multi-probe approach to extract the HJ parameters which 
influence the bottlenecks, and (3) propose guidelines to reach practical 
device efficiency limits.Finally, we propose to investigate (1) the 
fundamental limits of HJ solar cells and (2) provide guidelines for 
further improvement of module level efficiencies.

Thank you,
Raghu Vamsi K. Chavali
PhD Student
ECE, Purdue University
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