Solar Cell Materials

Silicon
Known as "solar grade silicon", crystalline silicon is by far the most prevalent bulk material for solar cells. Bulk silicon is separated into multiple categories according to crystallinity and crystal size in the resulting ingot, ribbon, or wafer.

Thin films
One problem is the amount or mass of light absorbing material required in creating a solar cell. Various thin-film technologies currently being developed reduce that mass. This can lead to reduced processing costs from that of bulk materials (in the case of silicon thin films) but also tends to reduce efficiency.

Organic/polymer solar cells
Organic solar cells and Polymer solar cells are built from thin films (typically 100 nm) of organic semiconductors. Examples of these include polymers and small-molecule compounds like polyphenylene vinyl, copper phthalocyanine (a blue or green organic pigment) and carbon fullerenes. Energy conversion efficiencies achieved to date using conductive polymers are low. The best cells to date are at 4-5% efficiency, but these cells could be beneficial for some applications where mechanical flexibility and disposability are important.

Nano-crystalline solar cells
Making use of some of the same thin-film light absorbing materials, these structures are overlain as an extremely thin absorber on a supporting matrix of conductive polymer or mesoporous metal oxide having a very high surface area to increase internal reflections (and hence increase the probability of light absorption)



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