• Solar Energy
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• v.6 no.1
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• pp.12-23
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• 1986

The PECVD $SiN_x:H$ films were made from the $SiH_4-N_2$ gas mixtures under such deposition conditions as 0.01 to 1.0 of $SiH_4/N_2$ volume ratio, 0.1 to $0.8W/cm^2$ of RF power, and 100 to $400^{\circ}C$ of substrate temperature. The deposition rate, refractive index, hydrogen concentration, N/Si composition, optical gap and electric conductivity were measured, and the thermal stability and the optimum deposition conditions were investigated for the application of these films to the solar cell materials.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Electrical and Electronic Material Engineers
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• v.29 no.6
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• pp.359-364
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• 2016

NiO serves as a window layer for Si photoelectric devices. Due to the wide energy bandgap of NiO, high optical transparency (over 80%) was achieved and applied for Si photoelectric devices. Due to the high the high mobility, the heterojunction device (Al/n-Si/$SiO_2$/p-NiO/ITO) provide ultimately fast photoresponses of rising time of $38.33{\mu}s$ and falling time of $39.25{\mu}s$, respectively. This functional NiO layer would provide benefits for high-performing photoelectric devices, including photodetectors and solar cells.

• 한국태양에너지학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2009.11a
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• pp.199-204
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• 2009

This study analyzed the central heating system and the cogeneration system among the methods of supplying energy which have application to the Hydrogen Fuel Cell system and apartment complexes for performance evaluations. Therefore, a feasibility study on the first application of this system in an apartment complexes was considered to evaluate the energy performance by the amount of fuel consumed by the system using Hydrogen Fuel Cell energy and environmental performance by the amount of greenhouse gas emissions. As a result, the Hydrogen Fuel Cell system consumes 83% of fuel while the cogeneration system consumes 81% of fuel comparison to conventional central heating system. The Hydrogen Fuel Cell and the cogeneration system produce 73%t and 70% of greenhouse gas emissions in comparison to conventional central heating system.

• Proceedings of the Materials Research Society of Korea Conference
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• 2012.05a
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• pp.98.2-98.2
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• 2012

Thin film solar cells are growing up in the market due to their high efficiency and low cost. Especially CdTe and $CuInGaSe_2$ based solar cells are leading the other cells, but due to the limited percentage of the elements present in our earth's crust like Tellurium, Indium and Gallium, the price of the solar cells will increase rapidly. Copper Zinc Tin Sulfide (CZTS) and Copper Zinc Tin Selenide (CZTSe) semiconductor (having a kesterite crystal structure) are getting attention for its solar cell application as the absorber layer. CZTS and CZTSe have almost the same crystal structure with more environmentally friendly elements. Various authors have reported growth and characterization of CZTSe films and solar cells with efficiencies about 3.2% to 8.9%. In this study, a novel method to prepare CZTSe has been proposed based on selenization of stacked Copper Selenide ($Cu_2Se$), Tin Selenide ($SnSe_2$) and Zinc Selenide (Zinc Selenide) in six possible stacking combinations. Depositions were carried out through RF magnetron sputtering. Selenization of all the samples was performed in Close Space Sublimation (CSS) in vacuum at different temperatures for three minutes. Characterization of each sample has been performed in Field Emission SEM, XRD, Raman spectroscopy, EDS and Auger. In this study, the properties and results of $Cu_2ZnSnSe_4$ thin films grown by selenization will be presented.

• Journal of the Korean Vacuum Society
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• v.20 no.3
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• pp.225-232
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• 2011

Reactive ion etching (RIE) technique for maskless surface texturing of mc-silicon solar wafers has been applied and succeed in fabricating a grass-like black-silicon with an average reflectance of $4{\pm}1%$ in a wavelength range of 300~1,200 nm. In order to investigate the optimized texturing conditions for mass production of high quantum efficiency solar cell Surface characteristics such as the spatial distribution of average reflectance, micrscopic surface morphology and minority carrier lifetime were monitored for samples from saw-damaged $15.6{\times}15.6\;cm^2$ bare wafer to key-processed wafers as well as the mc-Si solar cells. We observed that RIE textured wafers reveal lower average reflectance along from center to edges by 1% and referred the origin to the non-uniform surface structures with a depth of 2 times deeper and half-maximum width of 3 times. Samples with anti-reflection coating after forming emitter layer also revealed longer minority carrier lifetime by 40% for the edge compared to wafer center due to size effects. As results, mc-Si solar cells with RIE-textured surface also revealed higher efficiency by 2% and better external quantum efficiency by 15% for edge positions with higher height.

• Clean Technology
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• v.18 no.1
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• pp.43-50
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• 2012

Cleaning procedure of solar silicon wafer, following ingot sawing process in solar cell production is studied. Types of solar silicon wafer can be divided into monocrystalline or multicrystalline, and slurry sawn wafer or diamond sawn wafer according to the ingot growing methods and the sawing methods, respectively. Wafer surface and contaminants can vary with these methods. The characterisitics of contaminants and wafer surface are investigated for each cleaning substrate, and appropriate cleaning agents are developed. Physical properties and cleaning ability of the cleaning agents are evaluated in order to verify the application in the industry. The wafers cleaned with the cleaning agents do not show any residual contaminants when analyzed by XPS and regular patterns are formed after texturization. Furthermore, the cleaning agents are applied in the production industry, which shows superior cleaning results compared to the existing cleaning agents.

• Journal of the Korean Solar Energy Society
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• v.31 no.2
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• pp.82-88
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• 2011

The artificial increase in the solar intensity incident on solar cells using lenses or mirrors can allow solar cells to generate equivalent power with a lower cost. There are two types of concentration optics for solar energy conversion. One is to use mirrors, and the other is to use Fresnel lenses. The gains that can be achieved with a Fresnel lens or a parabolic mirror are compared. The result showed the gains are comparable and the two configurations were developed competitively. In application areas of Fresnel lenses as solar concentrators, several variations of design were devised and tested. Some PV systems still use commercially available flat Fresnel lenses as concentrators. A convex linear Fresnel lens to improve the concentration ratio and the efficiency is devised and flat linear Fresnel lens in thermal energy collection is utilized. In this study, we designed and optimized flat Fresnel lens and the 'light pipe' to develop 500X concentrated solar PV system. In the process, we compare the transmission efficiencies according to groove types. We performed rigorous ray tracing simulation of the flat Fresnel lenses. The computer aided simulation showed the 'grooves in case' has the better efficiency than that of 'grooves out case'. Based on the ray-trace results we designed and manufactured sample Fresnel lenses. The optical performance were measured and compared with ray-trace results. Finally, the optical efficiency was measured to be above 75%. All the design and manufacturing were performed based on that InGaP/InGaAs/Ge triple junction solar cell is used to convert the photon energy to electrical power. Field test will be made and analyzed in the near future.

• 한국신재생에너지학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2010.11a
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• pp.55.1-55.1
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• 2010

Cost efficient and large area deposition of superior quality $Al_2O_3$ doped zinc oxide (AZO) films is instrumental in many of its applications including solar cell fabrication due to its numerous advantages over ITO films. In this study, AZO films were prepared by a highly efficient rotating cylindrical dc magnetron sputtering system using AZO target, which has a target material utilization above 80%, on glass substrates in argon ambient. A detailed analysis on the electrical, optical and structural characteristics of AZO thin films was carried out for solar cell application. The properties of films were found to critically depend on deposition parameters such as sputtering power, substrate temperature, working pressure, and thickness of the films. A low resistivity of ${\sim}5.5{\times}10-4{\Omega}-cm$ was obtained for films deposited at 2kW, keeping the pressure and substrate temperature constant at 3 mtorr and $230^{\circ}C$ respectively, mainly due to an increase in carrier mobility and large grain size which would reduce the grain boundary scattering. The increase in carrier mobility with power can be attributed to the columnar growth of AZO film with (002) preferred orientation as revealed by XRD analysis. The AZO films showed a high transparency of>87% in the visible wavelength region irrespective of deposition conditions. Our results offers a cost-efficient AZO film deposition method which can fabricate films with significant low resistivity and high transmittance that can find application in thin-film solar cells.

• JSTS:Journal of Semiconductor Technology and Science
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.35-40
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• 2015

In this study, an n-ZnO/p-Si heterojunction diode with embedded Ag nanoparticles was fabricated to investigate the possible improvement of light trapping via the surface plasmon resonance effect for solar cell applications. The Ag nanoparticles were fabricated by the physical sputtering method. The acquired current-voltage curves and optical absorption spectra demonstrated that the application of Ag nanoparticles in the n-ZnO/p-Si interface increased the photo current, particularly in specific wavelength regions. The results indicate that the enhancement of the photo current was caused by the surface plasmon resonance effect generated by the Ag nanoparticles. In addition, minority carrier lifetime measurements showed that the recombination losses caused by the Ag nanoparticles were negligible. These results suggest that the embedding of Ag nanoparticles is a powerful method to improve the performance of n-ZnO/p-Si heterojunction solar cells.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Electrical and Electronic Material Engineers Conference
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• 2008.11a
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• pp.456-456
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• 2008

In the past few years, the deposition and characterization of cadmium sulfide semiconducting thin films has received a considerable amount of interest due to their potential application in the area of electronic and opto-electronic devices fabrications. Polycrystalline CdS thin films posses good optical transmittance, wide band-gap and electrical properties makes it as one of the ideal material for their application to solar cell fabrication. Cadmium sulfate thin films were deposited by the chemical bath deposition method using tartaric acid and triethanolamine as a complexing agent. Deposition parameters such as pH, temperature, deposition time and concentration of the reactant species were optimized so as to obtain reflecting, good adherent uniform thin films on the glass substrate. Reaction mechanism of the thin film formation is also reported. The crystallographic structure and the crystallite size were studied by the X-ray diffraction pattern. The optical band-gap of deposited film is identified by measuring the transmittance in the visible region. Temperature dependence of resistivity confirmed the semiconducting behavior of the film. Scanning electron micrographs (SEM) showed the presence of grain particles of size 50 nm.