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The Photovoltaic Solar Cell: how it works.
Exactly how a photovoltaic solar cell generates electricity from sunshine without any moving parts is fascinating. The science involved is quite in-depth as you would imagine. The basics are presented below. For more details on any of the topics, just follow the links and you'll come to a more detailed section. Discover the basic principles behind the operation of the solar cell. The concepts are made simple and the diagrams are easy to understand with no prior knowledge required. The operation of the solar energy cell is based on the movement of electrons from two differently prepared pieces of Silicon lattice. Sunlight dislodges electrons in one area and they are pulled toward the second region producing an electrical current. The differences between single solar energy cell crystals and cells that are made from many smaller crystals are of cost and efficiency. Single crystal cells are more efficient but are more difficult to produce and are therefore more expensive. The thin film solar cell is approximately 1% of the thickness of the standard crystalline cell. This makes them vastly more efficient in terms of resources required to construct them, though they do experience some degradation in their function over time. |
