Computational frameworks to enable accelerated development of defect-tolerant photovoltaic materials

Widespread adoption of carbon-free energy technologies, including and especially photovoltaics (PV), is vital to address the issue of climate change. Absent sweeping policy action, this will only happen if these technologies become the most economically viable energy source. While PV has become cheaper in recent years, technoeconomic modeling suggests that current PV technologies cannot come down in price enough to be deployed at the scale required by future energy-mix scenarios that avert catastrophic climate change. This issue can be addressed by developing new technologies - in particular, ones that rely on materials that can be manufactured at drastically cheaper costs than present-day ones. To perform well in a PV device, silicon (the active material in approximately 90% of devices on the market today) must be free of detrimental metallic impurities at levels of parts per billion; the process to achieve this purity requires expensive equipment and large energy expenditures.

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctoral

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Materials Science and Engineering

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2019

Author dc:creator

• Kurchin, Rachel Chava.

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Tonio Buonassisi.

• Materials Science and Engineering.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed, downloaded, or printed from this source but further reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/122174

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/122174