Spraying Quantum Dots
Achaetey worked on research as a part of Professor Alexi Arango's lab. She helps manufacture solar cells. She started working in the lab in summer 2015, and within the few months from the beginning of summer to fall, she has already designed a piece of equipment and wrote a standard working procedure for the Arango lab!
Achaetey Kabal ’17, Student Researcher
Major: Physics
Research Group: The Arango Lab
Leap Symposium Presentation: Small Device, Big Impact: On the Future of Solar Energy, October 2015
Achaetey worked on research as a part of Professor Alexi Arango's lab. She helps manufacture solar cells. She started working in the lab in summer 2015, and within the few months from the beginning of summer to fall, she has already designed a piece of equipment and wrote a standard working procedure for the Arango lab!
In order to make it easier to reach the evaporator, which sits inside the Nitrogen glove box in the lab she designed a 'grabber.' She says, "It is like large tweezers that open up and close by the push of a button on its handle so that we can grab materials with it to place them into and later remove them from the evaporator."
"The standard operating procedure I wrote is for the spraying quantum dots onto the transport layer of the solar cells," she continues. "We call it the spray gun, but the official name is the single feed siphon airbrush. We use it to spray quantum dots onto the transport layer. I work on analyzing the characteristics and effects of the transport layer, which is deposited onto the substrate via evaporation, to figure out a way to reach the maximum efficiency of the solar cells."
Achaetey says she has decided to become a physicist when during a high school exam, she forgot that she was taking an exam and lost track of time only to realize afterward that she had solved all the questions and had fun as if the test was a game!