Developed and released by University of New South Wales (UNSW) and PV Lighthouse in Australia, PV Factory allows the user to design and build virtual solar cells to maximise their efficiency, and to gain a deeper understanding of solar cell production.
"One of the key goals of this project is to improve the education of solar engineers which should lead to better and lower cost solar technologies for the future, says Richard Corkish, Senior Lecturer from UNSW and Chief Operating Officer of ACAP.
"Anyone with an interest in solar technology can log on and experiment with the software," he continued.
PV Factory processes virtual wafers through twelve production steps and presents the user with the electrical output of each solar cell.
The program is being utilised by engineering students at UNSW, Arizona State University and engineers in industry, and is available now online from http://factory.pvlighthouse.com.au
Fact sheet:
- Free photovoltaic production line simulator to drive deeper understanding of cell manufacture.
- Its completely free to register and use the software.
- Integrates sophisticated physics algorithms into a software package that is easy to use and understand.
- Already over 500,000 virtual cells have already been processed during beta testing with more than double that expected this semester.
- Commissioned by UNSW and supported by ACAP.
- The Program is supported by $33.1 million funding from the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA).
- Developed by PV Lighthouse and UNSW using latest cloud technologies.
- Extends UNSWs leading position in PV education to the next level.
- Already in use to teach courses at UNSW and ASU with other universities planned.
- Further development of PV Factory is being driven by a collaborative effort between universities and industry.
Using the Software
- Users can run a batch of virtual wafers through the production line to see what their likely output and failure rate will be.
- Allows students to run virtual experiments where the cost of the real experiment would otherwise be prohibitive.
- Users compete with each other on a leaderboard to gain the highest efficiency cells.
Practical approach to teaching photovoltaics, where students learn
- How solar cells are made
- The dependence of cell behaviour on fabrication inputs
- Interrelations between fabrication steps
- Effective ways to characterise cells to determine how they can be improved
- How to optimise cell efficiency.
Industry Reception
- Industry users are running virtual batches to verify their own predictions before making changes to the production line.
- Educating management and new engineers on how solar cells are manufactured and tested.
Ongoing development of PV Factory to introduce
- More production lines.
- Flexible approach to adding and reordering steps.
- More advanced fabrication algorithms.
- Large batch sizes and statistics analysis.
- An interface that allows academics and industry to contribute their steps and algorithms.
