i trying to make a solar panel. right now i dont have money to go and buy a copper sheet. so can i make it out of aluminum foil. if there is a way please tell me how. and what do i use for wires. i making this to charge batteries.
Presumably you plan to create a focused parabolic reflector and have it oriented to heat the bottom of a pan. It will obviously need to be larger than the pan in order to gather sunlight outside of the pan's shadow, as well as gather and concentrate enough light onto the bottom of the pan to heat its contents. If you use black paint on the bottom of the pan, make sure it's high temperature paint (available at auto supply stores, often used to paint engine blocks and exhaust manifolds). Yes, a cover on the pan will make it hotter.
No but look in youtube for other ways of charging batteries . There is allot of neat ideas like building a small wind generator from scrap parts such as old speaker magnets copper wire out of transformers things that most people toss in the junk .
You can't make a solar panel to generate any reasonable amount of electricity from that. You need a semiconductor to start with, in order to have something that can generate free charge carriers(electrons and holes) from photons. Then you need a junction which can separate the charges. In principle you could make a Shottky Diode solar cell from copper if you could find a doped semiconductor to bond a sheet of it to the copper. To form a decent electric field there should be a significant difference in work functions between the copper and the semiconductor, this will generally require the semiconductor to be doped. On top of this you would need a transparent conductor (most used are things like ITO or other 'TCOs' - Transparent Conducting Oxides) to be the top electrode to inject replacement charges into the semiconductor to replace the effect of recombination current. In summary, it's difficult to DIY. You generally need complicated machinery to get decent crystal growth and/or doping.
