Quokka Maturation · A mature Quokka for everyone – advancing the capabilities and accessibility of numerical solar cell simulations
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2016-02-01 → 2018-01-31
- EU contribution
- €171,461
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF-EF-ST
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
A mature Quokka for everyone – advancing the capabilities and accessibility of numerical solar cell simulations
A key task in tackling several of the world’s most pressing problems, comprising climate change, energy security and environmental pollution, consists in the fast replacement of the world’s largely fossil-based and non-sustainable energy system by renewable energies. Extraordinary political and technological advances in the last decade have made photovoltaics (PV) cost-competitive with mainstream electricity generation, which is now a key to transforming the energy system towards sustainability. This project helps accelerating the R&D efforts into solar cells by addressing a lack of sophisticated but accessible simulation software. It based on the free and popular solar cell simulation tool “Quokka”, originally developed by the Marie-Curie fellow. Supported by hosting the action at one of the world’s leading PV research institutes, Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems (ISE), Quokka was successfully re-coded and substantially enhanced towards a powerful commercial version called “Quokka3”. It is closing the gap between the two alternatives available to date: on the one hand powerful commercial software from the semiconductor industry, being complex, expensive and not dedicated to solar cells; on the other hand a plethora of free / inexpensive tools developed by the PV community, all with limited scope and substantial simplifications. Quokka3’s dedication to cover most of the relevant solar cell physics (but not more) makes it easy-to-use, yet powerful, with even some unprecedented capabilities like modelling a full-size silicon solar cell in 3D. With the release of Quokka3 during the project, PV researchers world-wide are now able to support their solar cell R&D efforts by a moderately priced yet very powerful simulation tool. Indeed the “Quokka community” has grown significantly from a few tenths of highly specialized users to more than hundred active users worldwide, making Quokka the most used simulation software for silicon photovoltaics. By the end of the project, it was already able to support many R&D activities at Fraunhofer ISE by the involvement of the fellow in current research projects, as evidenced by many scientific publications. In the final phase of this project, a German business has been founded to market Quokka3, which attracted already several customers at the time of writing the report. This step was already planned in the proposal of Quokka Maturation and thus emphasizes the success and impact of this project.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
This project is placed in the field of photovoltaics (PV), which is on the eve of competing with conventional electricity generation on a purely economic basis, and is able to effectively tackle ecologic and socio-economic problems caused by the existing energy system based on fossil fuels.It aims to help accelerating the R&D efforts into silicon solar cells, the dominating PV technology with a persistent market share of around 90%. Basis for this forms “Quokka”, a multidimensional silicon solar cell simulation tool recently developed by the applicant. Quokka is specifically designed for silicon solar cell conditions, which allows for valid simplifications to the general semiconductor modelling approaches, and sets it apart from generally more powerful commercial software and other free tools in terms of computational speed and ease of setup. Since its release for free early 2013, Quokka sees a rapid increase of usage amongst all major PV research institutes and manufacturers.Within this project, the applicant will grow Quokka from its (capable) childhood to a mature simulation tool, being supported by the world-leading expertise in solar cells of the host institution, Fraunhofer ISE. One measure consists in coding optimized numeric routines to efficiently handle much larger mesh sizes, e.g. enabling the unprecedented and very useful capability of simulating a full size silicon solar cell. Furthermore, several physical models of highest future relevance will be identified, experimentally validated and added to Quokka’s capabilities. Accessibility to PV scientists, engineers and students in Europe and worldwide forms a key point of this project, and will be achieved by publishing underlying algorithms and validation cases, and by continued free hosting, integration and documentation on the leading web-portal for solar cell modeling.This project will establish nothing less than the new standard for silicon solar cell simulation tasks, accessible for everyone.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- FRAUNHOFER GESELLSCHAFT ZUR FORDERUNG DER ANGEWANDTEN FORSCHUNG EV · MunchenCoordinatorGermany
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union