XsunX Inc. has completed a fully functional copper indium gallium diselenide (CIGS) thin-film solar device. The company's hybrid solar cell technology adapts manufacturing processes from the hard disk drive (HDD) industry to produce CIGS solar cells deposited onto a stainless-steel substrate with pseudo-square configuration. XsunX believes this technology can replace traditional silicon wafer solar cells.
‘Approaches to mass-scale production of CIGS thin-film cells today introduce processing defects that significantly reduce cell performance,’ states Robert Wendt, chief technology officer at XsunX. ‘Because we are leveraging stationary small-area, high-rate, production technologies and not scaling up to large-area processing, we're able to strive for laboratory-metric conversion efficiencies.’
In the next stage of development, XsunX says it will be evaluating technical data concerning performance and conversion efficiency to continue to fine-tune each cell layer based on input collected from small-area devices, as well as perfecting the engineering designs.
SOURCE: XsunX
