Director’s Corner
What exciting times at IEC!!!
Congratulations to IEC for being the recipient of four awards under DOE's Foundational Program to Advance Cell Efficiency
(F-PACE). The IEC staff are busy kicking off the new programs on:
"Low cost back contact heterojunction solar cells on thin c-Si wafers: integrating laser & thin film processing for improved manufacturability,"
P.I. Steve Hegedus
"Reduced Cu(InGa)Se2 thickness in solar cells using a superstrate configuration."
P.I. William Shafarman
"Advanced precursor reaction processing for Cu(InGa)Se2 solar cells."
P.I. William Shafarman
"Understanding the effect of Na in improving the performance of CuInSe2 based P."
P.I. Erten Eser
Additionally, IEC is a sub-recipient under NREL's F-PACE award "Enabling the CIGS thin-film PV technology to meet the DOE goal of $0.50/W module price" lead by Rommel Noufi and DOE's Transformational PV Science and Technology: Next Generation Photovoltaics II program, "Beyond the Lambertian limit -- Novel low-symmetry gratings for ultimate light trapping enhancement in next-generation photovoltaics," awarded to Assistant Professor Juejun Hu in the University of Delaware's Materials Science & Engineering Department and an IEC affiliated faculty member.
Many new faces are roaming the halls of IEC as a result of the new programs and soon we will have over 50 staff. This multi-disciplinary team has gotten the new research programs off to a good start and are confident in our ability to be instrumental in assisting DOE in meeting their Sun Shot goals.
Regards,
Robert W. Birkmire
Institute of Energy Conversion
University of Delaware