How gallium doping could prevent sunlight damage to solar panels

Infrastructure Trending News Published 26th July 2021

Solar power is one of the cheapest and greenest forms of electricity generation we have, especially in areas that get plenty of strong sunshine.

Australia is definitely one such place, and more than two million households boast solar panels, the highest per capita figure in the world.

How gallium doping could prevent sunlight damage to solar panels

Unfortunately, and perhaps a little ironically, the very sunlight that these panels use to generate electricity also damages them over time.

Now, a team of researchers from the University of New South Wales has come up with a way to prevent this degradation using a technique known as gallium doping.

The panels overwhelmingly used in Australia (and elsewhere in the world) are made primarily of silicon.

When sunlight hits a solar cell made of silicon, electrons break away, causing negative charges.

The energy from this process is the basis for the energy conversion from sunlight to electricity, but the cells need more than just pure silicon.

This is because the electrons released by the shining of sunlight do not all flow in the same direction.

Electricity fields are generated by adding atomic impurities

An electricity field is generated to achieve this, and in the silicon panels, this is done by adding impurity atoms to create a region with more negative charges than regular silicon (this region is known as n-type silicon) and another with fewer negative charges (p-type silicon).

Bringing these two parts together creates a p-n junction that allows the solar cell to function and convert the energy to electricity.

The process of adding the impurity atoms is known as doping, and boron is the atom most commonly used for this purpose.

It has a number of properties that make it suitable for doping, including having the right number of electrons and an ability to be uniformly distributed through the crystals required for the solar cells.

Unfortunately, the act of shining light on boron-infused silicon causes the silicon itself to degrade.

Improving this state of affairs has been a longstanding area of research and doping the silicon with gallium could well prove a solution.

The team said that the process of gallium doping has been locked under a patent for two decades but is now clear.

The tests showed not only that gallium-doped silicon produced a higher voltage compared to boron, but that it was also more stable.

This could potentially lead to a new generation of solar panel that is cheaper, more efficient, and does not degrade so much through exposure to sunlight over time.

Today’s news was brought to you by TD SYNNEX – the UK’s number one solutions distributor.

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