How solar cells works

Solar cells are made up of semiconductor materials which converts direct sunlight or light rays into electricity (Direct Current).

Solar cells are made up of cells just like batteries, but in contrast to batteries, each cells in a solar panel converts photons from sunlight into Direct current, while those of batteries converts chemical reaction into direct current.

Solar panels are also known as photovoltaic cells(PV cells) because they generate voltage from photons, in other words their voltage depends on the amount of photons they are exposed to.

What  are solar cells made up of?

Solar cells are made up of semiconductor materials which produces photons when exposed to light.

All semiconductors are photovoltaic. They produce photons when they are exposed to direct sunlight.

Solar cells are made of silicon atoms connected to one another to form a crystal lattice. Solar cells are made out of silicon wafers. These are made out of the element silicon, a hard and brittle crystalline solid that is the second most abundant element in the Earth's crust after oxygen. 

Silicon constitutes a large percentage of sand, if you are at the beach, you can easily see shiny specks in the sand, what u see is a silicon.

It naturally converts sunlight into each current.

Silicon which is a semiconductor or metalloid can be grown. It is usually grown in a tube as a single, uniform crystal, unrolling the tube and it us then cut into sheets or wafers.

A solar cell is made of a p-n junction semiconductor material. When light rays impinges on the N-TYPE surface electrons drift from the surface to the P-TYPE semiconductor, across the junction which acts as a barrier. If enough photons from light impinges on the N-TYPE surface, the barrier junction between the P-TYPE and N-TYPE becomes conductive therefore allowing current to flow.

How do solar cells convert light into electricity.

Light is made of packets of tiny particles called photons. When a photosensitive metal surface like silicon, potassium, germanium or ceausium is exposed into direct sunlight with a metal connected to it to form an anode, current drift from the photosensitive metal surface to the anode when photons which strikes the metal surface.

Photons strike the surface forcing electrons to flow from the photosensitive metal which acts as a cathode to a non photosensitive metal connected to it acting as the anode.

Extremely sensitive metals like pottasium, sodium, ceasiun are not use to produce  practical solar cells, because they are very reactive with water (dissolves in water) and they are cost to refine from their crude ores.

The amount of current a solar cell can produce depends on the intensity of sunlight it's exposed to and the size of the solar cell.

We can think of light as being made of tiny particles called photons, so a beam of sunlight is like a bright yellow fire hose shooting trillions upon trillions of photons our way. Stick a solar cell in its path and it catches these energetic photons and converts them into a flow of electrons—an electric current. Each cell generates a few volts of electricity, so a solar panel's job is to combine the energy produced by many cells to make a useful amount of electric current and voltage.