Facilities & capabilities
Explore our capabilities below to get an insight into the kinds of investigation possibilities are that we offer researchers wishing to join us from across Australia and around the world.聽
Solution processing
SPREE has various glove boxes that allow synthesising materials using liquid solution processing. This is, for example, used in the fabrication of organic, perovskite, and adamantine solar cells. This fabrication method is extremely flexible and allows for the rapid development of new solar cell materials. The objective is to develop (very) low costs solar cell technologies using solution processes for use in silicon-based tandem solar cells or in niche applications such as building-integrated photovoltaics.
Diffusion/annealing
SPREE has a long and rich history in developing high-efficiency silicon wafer solar cells, holding the silicon solar cell efficiency world record for over 30 years. One of the key steps in the fabrication of commercial solar cells is introducing dopants in the silicon wafer. We have three diffusion furnaces that can be used for boron & phosphorus diffusion for samples with a size of up to 156 mm by 156 mm.
Thin-film synthesis
Materials with a thickness ranging from a few nanometres to a few microns play a critical role in every solar cell technology. For this reason, SPREE is very well set up with equipment for the deposition of these thin films. We have various evaporators: physical vapour deposition (PVD), plasma-enhanced chemical vapour deposition (PECVD), and atomic layer deposition (ALD) in our laboratories. This allows our researchers to select the right type of equipment for their applications.
Metalisation
Solar cells need contacts to extract the photogenerated current into the external circuit. The industry-standard contact for silicon solar cells consists of silver and aluminium. These metal contacts are made using screen printing. SPREE is equipped with both a lab-scale and industrial-scale screen-printer.
Industrial solar cells
Our school is very fortunate to house an R&D pilot line on campus, the Solar Industrial Research Facility (SIRF), for making silicon solar cells up to a size of 156 mm using industrial equipment. We focus on transferring technology from the laboratory to the factories of our industrial partners. The pilot line houses various 黑料网大事记-developed production tools, the area of hydrogenation and plating, which are sold to the market by our equipment partners after successful qualification at our pilot line.
