etaOpt

Introduction

The Mathematica Package etaOpt is a software for calculating limiting efficiencies for arbitrary stacks of solar cells under a variety of conditions. As it is programmed object oriented it is very clear and easy to understand. Thereby following the method of detailed balance limit first introduced by W. Shockley and H.J. Queisser in 1961.

Modifying the attached examples in the directory examples, the reader should be able to do his own simulations easily. With the help of the export function the data can easily be exported as ASCII to be visualised in other programs.

Requirements

The Mathematica Package etaOpt has been developed and tested at Fraunhofer ISE in Freiburg, Germany with Wolfram Research Mathematica 4.0 and 4.1 under Linux 2.2.17, Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 2000. Thus

if you have Mathematica running on a machine you can use this package!

For more information about Mathematica visit Wolfram Research Inc.

etaOpt consists of

• the main package etaOpt.m

• a modified Version of the package Classes.m (Maeder, Roman E.. 1993. Object-oriented Programming. The Mathematica Journal, 3(1)),

• help functions summarised in Hilfsfunktionen.m and

• the Package bundle ExtendGraphics - only for direct ploting in Mathematica

Disclaimer

Fraunhofer ISE or the author (s) makes no warranty or representation, either express or implied, with respect to this software package, including their quality, merchantability, or fitness for a particular purpose.

In no event will Fraunhofer ISE or the author(s) be liable for direct, indirect, special, incidental, or consequential damages arising out of the use or inability to use this software package, even if Fraunhofer ISE or the author(s) has been advised of the possibility of such damages.

Getting more detailed information about physics and calculation procedure

EtaOpt was presented at the 17th European Photovoltaic Solar Energy Conference, Munich, October 2001. The paper which summarises the calculation procedure can be found as Acrobat pdf format here. If you do not have a viewer for pdf you can get the Acrobat Reader for free from http://www.adobe.com/

Reference manual for printing

You can find a reference manual in the directory help. EtaOpt_ref.pdf is for Adobe Acrobat Reader >= 4.0

Online help

EtaOpt has two online help systems:

• online help in html

• Usual Mathematica help system using

• ?methodname e.g. ?giveName to get help for a particular method and

• Methods@object e.g. Methods@spectrum to get a list of available methods

Requirements

• As it is programmed object oriented it is very clear and easy to understand.

• Modifying the attached examples in the directory examples, the reader should

• be able to do his own simulations easily. With the help of the export function

• the data can easily be exported as ASCII to be visualised in other programs.

Contact

If you have further questions or problems feel free to contact

Dr. Andreas Bett

EtaOpt is available for Linux and Windows. Actually, as the program is based on the platform independent software Mathematica. The content of the packages for Windows and Linux do not show any differences except of there packaging.

• Windows packages are ziped. So you need a zipper like pkzip or winzip to unpack the package.

• Linux packages are tared and gzipt, so you need to type in a shell tar -xvzf <packagename> to unpacke it.

Which packages shoold I choose?

• In any case you need the first package etaOpt.

• If you want to show contour plots in Mathematica you need the second package ExtendGraphics30. This package usually is already installed you can test this by evaluating in a Mathematica notebook following line: <<ExtendGraphics`LabelContour`

  If the installation of etaOpt fails, you should look at this package it contains the packages: PhysicalConstants.m, SIUnits.m, FilterOptions.m, which are normally included and installed in the Mathematica distribution, but in any case..

If you downloaded the packages successfully go on with the installation instruction described in the file readme.txt Current Revision of etaOpt is 2.6.

Further questions, bug reports, improvements

If you have any questions, suggestions for improvements or you found a bug feel free to contact

Dr. Andreas Bett