Extracted from several of the companies press releases and their website:
XsunX, Inc. (XSNX), developer of Power Glass -- a thin film solar technology that allows glass windows to produce electricity from the power of the sun, announced that it ended 2005 with continued progress in the development of its semi-transparent Power Glass thin films, that may allow the Company to begin marketing efforts of its technologies as early as Spring 2006. Power Glass is a solar technology that allows windows to produce electricity from the power of the sun without significantly altering the appearance or use of the window.
The design of the solar cell provides for the manufacture of very thin solar cells on transparent flexible plastics. As part of the manufacturing process numerous individual cells are produced on rolled plastics substrates and interconnected using minimally apparent segmentations. The resulting integrated solar cell design is monolithic or uniform in appearance and simulates tinted solar control films used in window shading applications. The Company believes the advantages to the use of Power Glass films over current solar glass designs lie in improved esthetic appearance, reduced manufacturing or assembly requirements, and lower finished product costs. The company estimates that Power Glass™ solar cells operating at half the efficiency of conventional opaque amorphous solar cells yet costing one fourth to produce results in a 100% efficiency-to-cost gain over conventional opaque solar cells. Final cost to efficiency analysis will be determined upon completion of development.
Another year end milestone is the launch of a program for the development of a new patent-pending 4 Terminal Nano-Crystalline solar cell. The 4 terminal solar cell design uses a combination of thin film transparent cell technology, derived from the Company's Power Glass initiative, with that of a nano-crystalline solar cell. XsunX believes that the combination of these two technologies into a single device holds a promising opportunity to deliver low cost, high efficiency, flexible, and light weight solar cells providing performance characteristics commonly found only in various forms of crystalline wafer technologies. Tom Djokovich, XsunX’s CEO. said: “Expanding our product base to include opaque solar cells will allow us to offer BIPV solutions for transparent building surfaces such as architectural glass, and the balance of buildings opaque surfaces such as residential and commercial roofs systems."
The Company’s announced in September that its patented reel-to-reel cluster tool manufacturing architecture could lead to low cost higher efficiency solar devices and provide an alternative to rigid wafer based silicon cells. The Company’s design combines, for the first time, the best attributes of two industry standards, in-line roll to roll processing techniques and the exact processing capabilities of cluster tool systems. While in-line roll to roll processing systems are widely used in the manufacture of thin film solar cells, their ability to provide higher unit volumes comes at the cost of reduced solar cell efficiency and the inefficient use of materials. Conversely, multi-chamber based cluster tool systems provide the extreme control necessary to produce such high value items as thin film transistors, and rigid crystalline solar cells, but have sacrificed throughput resulting in lower unit volume.
The core design of the Company’s manufacturing process is based on a patented multi-chamber cluster tool approach using cassettes to control or handle rolls of thin plastic films. The rolls of material (transparent plastic films) are loaded into the cassettes and robotically moved between chambers or stations. Layers of transparent semiconductor and conducting materials are deposited onto the plastics in a manner which prevents cross contamination between chambers to achieve high performance, semi-transparent, large area solar cell devices. They planned to begin construction of their first system near years end.
Resources:
XSUNX Ends 2005 on a High Note, Press release, January 3, 2005
XSUNX, Inc., Aliso Viej, CA, USA
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