Design of a Project - Research Paper Example

This makes them costly as the manufacturing process includes removal of impurities. The spherical solar cells are silicon spherical cells that are repeatedly melted and fused with low-purity metals. The spheres are made by using the surface tension in a zero-gravity environment. This makes them relatively expensive to produce. However research has suggested that the spherical solar cells have certain benefits over the simple planar cells. The most important of these advantages include the spherical directivity of such cells.

Because of the spherical nature of the cells, there is no directivity of light in case of spherical solar cells and lights from all directions including reflected and scattered light (Nakata, 2001). However there has been no quantitative analysis of this proposition. This paper aims at doing the same. The light-receiving characteristics of a spherical solar cell will be evaluated through a geometrical model. This will include the analysis of the characteristics of the light receiving properties of spherical solar cells, along with a comparison of the planar cells.

Based on the comparison, advantages and disadvantages of each type will be evaluated. As can be seen from the figure 3, L1 is incident perpendicularly to the surface while L2 does not strike the surface in a perpendicular fashion. Since a unit cell is having a very small effective area, every point on the cell will have directivity with respect to the incident light. On the basis of this, the effective area of the entire cell can be calculated: Based on the available literature, and the model described, it can be assumed that there is no directivity in unit cells.

The author also expects that the power generated in spherical cells is much more than simple planar cells. The author expects to conduct experiment trails to validate these assumptions. Based on the theoretical framework described above, the methodology will try to assess the effective area of