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<p>A new type of flexible silicon solar cell has been fabricated by interconnecting solar cell die on a flexible substrate. The fabrication process is described in this thesis. The solar cell die were diced using two methods. One method was to dice a solar cell completely through. The other method was to dice a solar cell from its back partially and then cleave through. To study the effects of different dicing methods on the performance of solar cell die, storage delay time measurement was employed to determine the lifetime of excess electrons in the p region of the two types of solar cell die. A laser beam induced current (LBIC) scanning technique was employed to study the electrical performance of the two types of solar cell die. The carrier diffusion lengths of two types of solar cell die were also determined by traveling light spot diffusion length measurement.</p><p>The theoretical response of a solar cell was compared to experimental results at various incident light angles. OpticLab software was used to model the incident light angle and lens spacing dependence of solar cell performance.</p> / Thesis / Master of Applied Science (MASc)

Yes / A printed dipole antenna integrated with a duplex RF switch used for mobile base station antenna beam steering is presented. A coplanar waveguide to coplanar strip transition was adopted to feed the printed dipole. A novel RF switch circuit, used to control the RF signal fed to the dipole antenna and placed directly before the dipole, was proposed. Simulated and measured data for the CWP-to-CPS balun as well as the measured performance of the RF switch are shown. It has demonstrated the switch capability to control the beam in the design of beam steering antenna array for mobile base station applications.

This research is intended to better understand the structural behavior of steel bridge beams that have experienced section loss near the bearings. This type of deterioration is common in rural bridges with leaking expansion joints, which exposes the superstructure to corrosive road deicing solutions. Seventeen beams from 4 decommissioned structures throughout Virginia were tested to induce web shear failure near the bearing locations and measured for load, vertical displacement, and web strain behavior. The strain was measured using a digital image correlation (DIC) system to create a digital strain field at equal loading and beam displacement intervals during testing. The data recorded during these large-scale tests was compared to several existing methods for calculating the shear capacity of the damaged beams. Finally, the most appropriate method of these approaches was identified based on accuracy, conservatism, and ease of implementation for load rating. When using load rating methods to determine a steel beam's capacity, this study also recommends that the effective area of the web used in determining the percentage of remaining thickness should consist of the bottom 3 inches of the web and should extend the length of the bearing plus one beam height excluding any areas without any noticeable section losses. / Master of Science / Older bridge structures typically include a rubber joint near the ends to allow for expansion and contraction of the bridge due to heating and cooling from the weather. In many cases, these joints will get damaged due to impacts from vehicle tires and other environmental disturbances. Damage to these joints allows for water to leak through, which, while not in of itself harmful, also allows melting snow to carry road salts laid in the winter to spread onto the underlying bridge steel. These salts cause aggravated corrosion of the steel beams below the bridge's deck, resulting in damage or collapse of the bridge itself. The goal of this study was to characterize this damage and determine how it affects the remaining capacity of the bridge. This objective was achieved by testing 17 beams from 4 out of service bridges with varying damage levels. A load was applied near the damaged ends to determine their behavior during loading, to locate areas of high strain resulting from corrosion, and find the beam's capacity. Several methods to predict the remaining strength in corroded steel beams were compared and recommendations made based on accuracy and conservatism.

This thesis describes development of the DRACO plasma simulation code. DRACO is an electro-static (ES) code which uses the particle-in-cell (PIC) formulation to track plasma particles through a computational domain, and operates within the Air Force COLISEUM framework. The particles are tracked on a non-standard mesh, which combines the benefits of a Cartesian mesh with the surface-resolving power of an unstructured mesh. DRACO contains its own mesher, called VOLCAR, which is also described in this work. DRACO was applied to a fully kinetic simulation of an ion-beam neutralization. The thruster configuration and running parameters were based on the NASA's 40cm NEXT ion thruster. The neutralization process was divided into three steps. Electron dynamics was studied by assuming an initial beam neutralization, which was accomplished by injecting both electrons and ions from the optics. Performing the simulation on a full-sized domain with cell size much greater than the Debye length resulted in a formation of a virtual anode. Decrease of the cell size to match the Debye length was not feasible, since it would require a million-fold increase in the number of simulation nodes. Instead, a scaling scheme was devised. Simulations were performed on thruster scaled down by a factor of 100, but its operating parameters were also adjusted such that the produced plasma environment did not change. Loss of electrons at the boundary of the finite simulation domain induced a numerical instability. The instability resulted in a strong axial electric field which sucked out electrons from the beam. It was removed by introducing an energy based particle boundary condition. Combination of surface scaling and energy boundary resulted in physically sound simulation results. Comparison were made between the Maxwellian and polytropic temperatures, as well as between simulation electron density and one predicted by the Boltzmann relationship. The cathode was modeled individually from the beam by introducing a positively charged collector plate at a distance corresponding to the beam edge. The local Debye length at the cathode tip was too small to be resolved by the mesh, even if mesh-refinement was incorporated. Since the simulation was not concerned with the near-tip region, two modifications were performed. First, the a limiting value of charge density at the tip was imposed. Second, the cathode potential was allowed to float. These two modifications were necessary to prevent development of a strong potential gradient at the cathode tip. The modified cathode model was combined with ion injection from the optics to model the actual beam neutralization. Three configurations were tested: a single thruster, a 2x2 cluster with individual cathodes and a similar cluster with a single large neutralizer. Neither of the cases achieved neutralization comparable to one in the base-line pre-neutralized case. The reason for the discrepancy is not known, but it does not seem to be due a loss of electrons at the walls. The difference could be due to limited extent of the modeled physics. An additional work is required to answer this question. / Master of Science