Factors Affecting the Quality of Concrete Containing Solar PV Cells through Taguchi Method

¹ Dept. of Civil Engineering, National Ilan University, Yilan 260, Taiwan
² Center for Sustainable Development, National Ilan University, Yilan 260, Taiwan
³ Dept. of Harbor and River Engineering, National Taiwan Ocean University, Keelung 202, Taiwan

^a Corresponding author: hmhsu@niu.edu.tw

Abstract

In order to comply with the implementation of sustainable development, the construction industry through the use of less polluting green energy technology is already imminent and more had to do. Production of Portland cement consumes large amount of energy and releases lots of carbon dioxide, nevertheless, the developing of sustainable society means more urgent and important to search for new cementitious materials to replace Portland cement in future constructions. The research employs Taguchi method to identify the key factors influencing the performance of alkali activated silica fume concrete in which amorphous silicon solar cells are ground and added into the mixture. Taguchi method has made valuable contributions to statistics and engineering. It provides techniques for investigating variation in experiments, system, parameter and tolerance design, all of which have been influential in improving manufactured quality. The conclusions were made thru ANOVA and F-test based on the statistical analyses. Next, we expect the inconsistence observed in the study to be further resolved by Grey Relational Analysis which is a normalization evaluation technique to solve the complicated multi-performance characteristics optimization effectively.