All About Solar on YouTube

All About Solar cells is a series of lectures on the use and fabrication of solar cells.

The solar cell industry continues to grow in leaps and bounds and will have a major impact on energy production in the future. The Solar Power Laboratory at Arizona State University has been running the student led pilot line for the past six years as part of the QESST research Engineering Research Center and more recently included the NCI-SW. The line has had taught over 200 people how to make a solar cell in hands on setting where the learners get to make a solar cell from start to finish. Many of the learners are already experienced in the industry while for others it is their first time in a laboratory.

One of those students, Edward LeBeau, wanted to give something back to the pilot line. He recognized that while there were lots of resources on the fabrication of solar cells they weren’t always relevant to what happens in the lab.  “The Pilot Line was a great introduction to research during my first year at ASU. I wanted to give something back, and thought a set of introductory lectures for people who are new to solar would be a good contribution,” said Eddy. Using resources from SPL, he developed a series of lectures to provide the background information to the fabrication of the cells that we make. He starts out with an overall introduction on the solar cell industry and then continues through cell fabrication and characterization.

These lectures are now available for free on youtube. We hope that they will be useful not only for people learning how to make solar cells at the ASU pilot line but also for people who want an introduction to the way solar cells are made.

Each lecture is about 10 minutes in length and the whole series takes about an hour.

Quantum Energy and Sustainable Solar Technologies (QESST) is an Engineering Research Center (ERC) sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) that focuses on advancing photovoltaic science, technology and education in order to address one of society’s greatest challenges: sustainably transforming electricity generation to meet the growing demand for energy.

Nanotechnology Collaborative Infrastructure Southwest ( NCI-Southwest) supports the advanced tool-set, faculty expertise, and knowledgeable staff required by academic and industrial users performing research at the frontiers of nanoscience and engineering.