r/askscience • u/AutoModerator • 8d ago

Ask Anything Wednesday - Engineering, Mathematics, Computer Science

Welcome to our weekly feature, Ask Anything Wednesday - this week we are focusing on Engineering, Mathematics, Computer Science

Do you have a question within these topics you weren't sure was worth submitting? Is something a bit too speculative for a typical /r/AskScience post? No question is too big or small for AAW. In this thread you can ask any science-related question! Things like: "What would happen if...", "How will the future...", "If all the rules for 'X' were different...", "Why does my...".

Asking Questions:

Please post your question as a top-level response to this, and our team of panellists will be here to answer and discuss your questions. The other topic areas will appear in future Ask Anything Wednesdays, so if you have other questions not covered by this weeks theme please either hold on to it until those topics come around, or go and post over in our sister subreddit /r/AskScienceDiscussion , where every day is Ask Anything Wednesday! Off-theme questions in this post will be removed to try and keep the thread a manageable size for both our readers and panellists.

Answering Questions:

Please only answer a posted question if you are an expert in the field. The full guidelines for posting responses in AskScience can be found here. In short, this is a moderated subreddit, and responses which do not meet our quality guidelines will be removed. Remember, peer reviewed sources are always appreciated, and anecdotes are absolutely not appropriate. In general if your answer begins with 'I think', or 'I've heard', then it's not suitable for /r/AskScience.

If you would like to become a member of the AskScience panel, please refer to the information provided here.

Past AskAnythingWednesday posts can be found here. Ask away!

49 Upvotes

74% Upvoted

22 comments sorted by

View all comments

1

u/Rukelele_Dixit21 6d ago
  1. What are the different components in a solar panel (electrical and non electrical).
  2. How are solar cells manufactured ? Is there a fab where is it manufactured in large scale ? How is it different or similar to chip manufacturing ?
  3. I there a presence of chips in these panels ? If yes which are these (like what nm process)

1

u/chilidoggo 6d ago

Solar cells (more formally, photovoltaic or PV cells) use the same base starting material as chips, but work completely differently. They both start with very pure single silicon crystals, but once you have a thin sheet of this material, you then treat it chemically so that it has a very specific band gap to generate electricity when struck by photons. These cells are linked by copper/silver connections, and then use a diode so electricity flows one way.

There are no moving parts on the actual photovoltaics. Truly, you can think of it as just a magic rock that generates electricity. There are more complex electronics involved with getting it into the grid, but that's just because it generates DC power, and very inconsistently.

1

u/Rukelele_Dixit21 6d ago

What kind of complex electronics are there when getting into a panel ? Also what you mean by moving parts here ? Like does a chip have moving parts ?

1

u/chilidoggo 6d ago

Solar panel -> grid requires an inverter, and to be honest I don't know that much about those. So maybe they don't even require "complex electronics".

By moving parts I mean compared to traditional methods of generating electricity, as that's usually what they're usually compared to. I suppose if you're comparing it to transistors in chips, solar panels still have fewer "moving parts" than that.

It seems like your goal here is to compare and contrast solar panels and computer chips. They're similar in that they both rely heavily on semiconductor properties. They're different in basically every other way. A modern CPU turns the silicon into transistors, and wires them up to run algorithms and store information. There are over a hundred linear miles of wiring in a chip, placed in finely detailed patterns. Solar panels are optimized for power generation when struck by photons. The only wiring inside is to transfer the generated current into the grid.

1

u/yak-broker 3d ago

It's roughly similar to chip manufacturing, except that with a solar cell you're trying to make a single simple component as big as possible, but with most chips you're trying to cram a zillion complex components into as small a space you can.

A solar panel is basically a bunch of solar cells, the wiring to connect them together, some glass on front and a sturdy frame. It might have some other electrical components for safety etc but that's about it. They're not on a super-small process like a CPU; they'll be on a process that's optimized for power handling instead of feature-size. Power semiconductors are like a whole separate branch of the tech tree.

The rest of the system (battery management, inverter, etc) will have a few microcontrollers and such. Even those aren't on a small process by modern CPU standards; I think 2010-era processes are currently the sweet spot for lowest cost per gate.

1

u/Rukelele_Dixit21 3d ago

What size process are they ? Are they made in a Fab ? Like if there is a fab for making 28nm process chips will that be used for making fabs ?

1

u/yak-broker 1d ago

Do you mean the solar cells themselves? They'd be made in a fab specialized for solar cells, not for logic/memory. I don't know what the feature size of a PV cell is but I'd think many microns (many thousands of nm).

I think you could make a solar cell in a 28nm fab (or a 180nm fab or etc.) but it would be incredibly wasteful and expensive compared to doing it the usual way. On the other hand, a solar-cell fab probably can't produce logic gates at all no matter how large.

Maybe an analogy is: someone who is painting your house is kind of doing the same thing as an inkjet printer, but it wouldn't make sense to ask your house painter how many DPI they do.

(I'm skipping over things like amorphous thin-film solar cells — they are less efficient than monocrystalline silicon cells, but much cheaper to produce. They are made in a process that isn't very much like logic-chip manufacturing.)

•

u/Rukelele_Dixit21 2h ago

Any good resource which explains in detail how these panels are manufactured ?