The output characteristics of micro-solar cell arrays are analyzed on the basis of a modified model in which the shunt resistance between cell lines results in current leakage. The modification mainly consists of adding a shunt resistor network to the traditional model. The obtained results agree well with the reported experimental results. The calculation results demonstrate that leakage current in substrate affects seriously the performance of GaAs micro-solar cell arrays. The performance of arrays can be improved by reducing the number of cells per line. In addition, at a certain level of integration, an appropriate space occupancy rate of the single cell is recommended for ensuring high open circuit voltages, and it is more appropriate to set the rates at 80%−90% through the calculation.

Dipolar and quadrupolar resonance wavelengths of SiO2/Au nanoshell surface plasmons are designed at 560 nm to enhance the light trapping in thin film solar cells. In order to quantitatively describe the light trapping effect, the forward-scattering efficiency (FSE) and the light trapping efficiency (LTE) are proposed by considering the light scattering direction of SiO2/Au nanoshells. Based on the Mie theory, the FSE and the LTE are calculated for SiO2/Au nanoshells of different dimensions, and the contributions of the dipolar and quadrupolar modes to the light trapping effect are analyzed in detail. When the surface coverage of nanoshells is 5%, the LTEs are 21.7% and 46.9% for SiO2/Au nanoshells with sizes of (31 nm, 69 nm) and (53 nm, 141 nm), respectively. The results indicate that the SiO2/Au nanoshell whose quadrupolar mode peak is designed to the strongest solar energy flux density of the solar spectrum facilitates the further enhancement of light harvesting in thin film solar cells.

The photovoltaic conversion efficiency for monolithic GaInP/GaInAs/Ge triple-junction cell with various bandgap combination (300 suns, AM1.5d) was theoretically calculated. An impressive improvement on conversion efficiency was observed for a bandgap combination of 1.708, 1.194, and 0.67 eV. A theoretical investigation was carried out on the effect of dislocation on the metamorphic structure's efficiency by regarding dislocation as minority-carrier recombination center. The results showed that only when dislocation density was less than 1.6×10 6 cm −2 , can this metamorphic combination exhibit its efficiency advantage over the fully-matched combination. In addition, we also briefly evaluated the lattice misfit dependence of the dislocation density for a group of metamorphic triple-junction system, and used it as guidance for the choice of the proper cell structure. tandem solar cell, theoretical efficiency, dislocation, buffer layers Citation: Zhang H, Chen N F, Wang Y, et al. Evaluating the effect of dislocation on the photovoltaic performance of metamorphic tandem solar cells. Sci