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Two different phases of alumina (Al2O3) nanoparticles (γ-alumina and α-alumina) have successfully been synthesized by using a sol-gel method. During the process a mixture of aluminum nitrate and citric acid (C/N=0.5) was heated at 60°C followed by 80°C until a gel was formed. The amorphous gel structure then was dried and sintered from 600°C to 1200°C. From the X-ray diffraction (XRD) analysis, crystalline structure of γ-alumina started to form at 800°C with average crystallite size of 11.5 nm, followed by the formation of the mixture phase of γ-alumina and α-alumina at 1000°C. The transformation from γ- to α-alumina occured at 1100°C of sintering temperature and above with the average crystallite size of 49 nm. The efficiency of the synthesized alumina nanoparticles as an adsorbents was tested by immersing the powder into the copper ions solution. The percentage of the copper removal was measured by using atomic absorption spectroscopy (AAS). It was found that, the efficiency of the alumina nanoparticles as an adsorbent was not depending on their phases, but might due to the increased of the particle size at higher sintering temperature. The highest percentage of removal 82.1% was obtained when using the alumina sintered at 1200°C.

Abstract. Dye sensitized solar cell (DSSC) is a promising candidate for a low cost solar harvesting technology as it promised a low manufacturing cost, ease of fabrication and reasonable conversion efficiency. Basic structure of DSSC consists of photoanode, dye, electrolyte and counter electrode. Photoanode plays an important role for a DSSC as it supports the dye molecules and helps in the electron transfer that will determine the energy conversion efficiency. This paper emphasizes the various improvements that had been done on the TiO2 and ZnO photoanode nanostructures synthesized through thermal method. For overall comparisons, ZnO nanoflowers photoanode had achieved the highest energy conversion efficiency of 4.7% due to its ability of internal light scattering that had increased the electron transportation rate. This has made ZnO as a potential candidate to replace TiO2 as a photoanode material in DSSC.

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Despite the increasing trend of n-type silicon wafer utilization in the manufacturing of high-efficiency heterojunction solar cells due to the superior advantages over p-type counterparts, its high manufacturing cost remains to be one of the most crucial factors, which impedes its market share growth with state-of-the-art silicon heterojunction (SHJ) solar cells demonstrating high conversion efficiencies from various configurations, the prospect of using an n-type wafer is debatable from a cost-efficiency point of view. Hence, a systematic comparison between p- and n-type SHJ solar cells was executed in this work using AFORS-HET numerical software. Front and rear-emitter architectures were selected for each type of wafer with ideal (without defects) and non-ideal (with defects) conditions. For ideal conditions, solar cells with p-type wafers and a front-emitter structure resulted in a maximum conversion efficiency of 28%, while n-type wafers demonstrated a maximum efficiency of 26% from the rear-emitter structure. These high-performance devices were possible due to the optimization of the bandgap and electron-affinity for all passivating and doping layers with values ranging from 1.3 to 1.7 eV and 3.9 to 4 eV, respectively. The correlation between the device structure and the type of wafers as demonstrated here will be helpful for the development of both types of solar cells with comparable performance.