Home Made Solar Panel
How to make a Solar Cell?
I want to make a home made Solar Panel, just with the things that I have in my house or with the cheap things of the little hardware store from the neighborhood. For this I need to know how to make a solar cell. And for this I need a full documentation with a lot of details with everything I need to know about how to make it home made. Please help me with some free documentations about this. Thanks.
When I was a lot younger, maybe even younger than you are now, I was fascinated with the idea of getting “free” power from sunshine. One day I found a book in the library that described how to make a “solar cell” out of ordinary copper sheeting or flashing, which is sometimes used in roofing. Copper sheeting should be readily available at any hardware store or “big box” home center like Lowe’s or Home Depot, but the book with instructions is probably long out of print.
Fortunately for you I found a web site, with pictures, that describes exactly how to make a homemade copper “solar cell” pretty much like I remember reading about fifty-something years ago. Find it here:
http://worldwatts.com/homemade_solar_cell/homemade_solar_cell.html
Now bear in mind this copper-based “solar cell” won’t be anything at all like the little silicon Solar Cells you can buy at Radio Shack or elsewhere. It will not produce very much current nor very much voltage. You won’t be able to power much of anything with it. About the best you can hope for is to demonstrate, using a sensitive microammeter, that it does produce electricity when exposed to light.
A silicon solar cell capable of producing useful power from the Sun is a very high tech thing. You probably won’t be able to make it at home with stuff you get from a hardware store. At the very least it involves growing, in vacuum or under inert gas, a boule of single-crystal silicon using an induction-heated furnace and slowly pulling the crystal from the melt over a period of several weeks. This is the Czochralski Crystal Growth Process. Then you need to slice wafers from the boule using a diamond slurry carried on a wire saw. Next, polish the surface to a mirror finish. Diffuse “dopant” elements into the surface to create a diode junction. Do this by either using very dangerous metal-organic chemical processes that ignite violently on contact with air or moisture, or do it by implanting “dopant” ions in huge quantities using a particle accelerator. And finally, coat the surface with multi-layer dielectric film coatings to maximize light absorption and minimize light reflection. Then you ultrasonically bond some wires to it and… voila! a homemade solar cell costing only a bit less than a half-million dollars. Or buy one already made at Radio Shack.