Ballasted Mounting System
Ideal Solar Cell Operation And Structure By Hybrid Solar Power:
The Solar Cell which converts sunlight into electricity is an electronic device. Shining light on the solar cell produces current and voltage to generate electric energy. The process includes a material in which the absorption of light raises an electron to a higher energy state, and the movement of this higher energy electron from the solar cell into an external circuit, the electron then dissipates its energy in the external circuit and returns to the solar cell. There are a variety of materials and processes can potentially meet the requirements for photovoltaic energy conversion, but in practice nearly all photovoltaic energy conversion uses semiconductor in the form of a p-n junction.
The operations that take place in a Solar Cell:
- Generate light-generated carriers;
- Collect light-generated carriers to produce a current;
- Generate large voltage across the Solar Cell;
- Draining the power in load and parasitic resistances.
Solar Cell Light Generated Current:
Solar Cell Current producing is known as “light-generated current”, which includes two key operations.
The first operation is the absorption of incident photons to produce electron-hole pairs. Only through an energy greater than that of the band gap in solar cell produces this electron-hole pairs. However, electrons (in the p-type material), and holes (in the n-type material) are meta-stable and will only exist for a length of time equal to the minority carrier lifetime before they recombine. If the carrier recombines, then the light-generated electron-hole pair will be lost and no current or energy will be produced.
The second operation is the collection of these carriers by the p-n junction, prevents this recombination by using a p-n junction to spatially separate the electron and the hole. The carriers gets separated by the affect of the electric field existing at the p-n junction. When the light-generated minority carrier reaches the p-n junction, it’s swept across the junction by the electric field at majority carrier the junction. If transmitter/emitter and base of the solar cell are connected together (i.e., if the solar cell is short-circuited), then the light-generated carriers flow through the external circuit.
Ideal Solar Cell flow at short circuit is shown in the animation below,
