Rhett Evans

Rhett Evans received his bachelor degree in Electrical Engineering at UNSW in 1998, and his PhD in Photovoltaic Engineering from UNSW in 2018. He has 20 years’ experience across all areas of PV, mostly in private sector R&D. He has worked managing R&D teams, developing new technologies, technology transfer, cell and module manufacturing, reliability testing, field deployment, field monitoring and financial modelling. Rhett’s PhD is in the area of statistical modelling and optimisation of manufacturing data. He is a part time Postdoctoral Fellow in the Photoluminesence research team at UNSW and he separately works part time at BT Imaging in Sydney. He has also signed licensing agreements to commercialise and develop the work from his PhD within his own company.

Rhett is a part of the group’s latest ARENA-funded project. His specific interest in in developing optimised metrology sequences for photovoltaic manufacturing. He is working in a number of industry – university collaborative sub-projects that are collecting large sets of data generated in a manufacturing context. The aim of these projects will be to develop and tailor new and existing analytical techniques to improve the understanding of the manufacturing system and even to better understand detailed cell level behaviour. The bigger picture of this work is to consider manufacturing execution in the fuller context of product quality and field performance in order to develop learning and optimal control and data collection strategies across all parts of the value chain, including closed loop control strategies where appropriate. Rhett has numerous publications – journals, conference presentations, a book chapter and public seminars related to his research work.