Congratulations to Ms Gurleen Kaur, PhD student supervised by Associate Professor Aaron Danner of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, NUS for having received the Best Paper Award at the 10th International Conference on Crystalline Silicon Photovoltaics (Silicon PV 2020).
The winning entry was titled “Can Charge Enhance Selectivity? Passivated Contacts Using a Highly Charged AlOx Dielectric Tunnel Layer Comparing SiOx/p+poly-Si and SiOx/PEDOT:PSS to AlOx/p+poly-Si and AlOx/PEDOT:PSS” and was selected as a top paper representing the best current research in crystalline Silicon Photovoltaics technology. She also received an invitation to publish her paper in the Solar Energy Materials and Solar Cells journal. Her talk was also chosen as one of the video highlights of the conference which can be accessed here (https://cms2020.siliconpv.com/video/list).
Gurleen’s doctoral research focused on developing low-cost and high-efficiency solution architectures for industrial solar cells. She also worked on screening several monolayers thick dielectric films and novel material alternatives (low-cost, organic, biodegradable polymers) for application in silicon solar cells in collaboration with Solar Energy Research Institute of Singapore.
“Our ultrathin aluminium oxide tunnel layers paired with organic, biodegradable, PEDOT:PSS in solar cells not only show efficiency potential as high as 26% but is also a low-cost, biodegradable, dopant-free material alternative to industrial silicon based processes. Further, aluminium oxide layers, due to the presence of high negative interface charge density allows easy extraction of holes in the devices. This low-cost technique for hole extraction can be used in a variety of solar cell technologies- silicon based, thin-film CIGS, tandem, etc.” explained Gurleen Kaur.
For her work in the field of renewable energy during her PhD, Gurleen has been named as the Future Energy Leader by BP plc, BP Scholar, and One Young World Ambassador.
