An investigation on the optoelectronic and thermoelectric properties of reactive evaporated degenerate and non degenerate p-type semiconducting compound selenide thin films for photovoltaic and thermoelectric applications

Abstract

The use of energy in our day to day life has grown exponentially and conserving energy to meet the world’s escalating energy demands is the need of the hour. During the past decade there is a heightened awareness all over the world that the production costs of energy from coal, oil and natural gas is increasingly higher and at the same time the energy technologies involving their use are contributing to a serious rise in the greenhouse gases in the environment and a consequent global warming. As a result, more attention is focused on the utilization of clean energy technologies, especially solar energy which has a great potential to meet a large fraction of world’s energy demands using photovoltaics (PV). The heart of the PV system that efficiently convert sunlight directly into electricity through photovoltaic effect is the solar cell - originally developed for space applications in the 1950s, are now used in consumer products, mounted on roofs of houses or assembled into large power stations.