Quadruple‐Junction Thin‐Film Silicon Solar Cells Using Four Different Absorber Materials

Tong, Fai; Isabella, Olindo; Hui‐min, Tan; Zeman, Miro

doi:10.1002/solr.201700036

Cited by 7 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 31 publications

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“…By reducing the light absorption of the top subcell, the middle cell would receive more light, and the multijunction cell would be better current matched. In order to do so, the 150 nm a‐Si:H top absorber can be changed by a higher bandgap a‐Si:H material previously developed, using higher hydrogen dilution and lower temperatures. In addition, the absorber thicknesses had to be reoptimized for the new material.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Water splitting applications are particularly sensitive to the values of open‐circuit voltage ( V oc ) and fill factor ( FF ), in which TRJs play a crucial role. The junction between the a‐Si:H cell and the nc‐Si:H cell have been previously studied . However, the junction between the nc‐Si:H cell and the silicon heterojunction (SHJ) cell is relatively unexplored .…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The junction between the a-Si:H cell and the nc-Si:H cell have been previously studied. [8][9][10] However, the junction between the nc-Si:H cell and the silicon heterojunction (SHJ) cell is relatively unexplored. 11,12 Moreover, in order to improve the current density of the multijunction solar cell, light management techniques need to be implemented.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Designing a hybrid thin‐film/wafer silicon triple photovoltaic junction for solar water splitting

Perez‐Rodriguez

Vijselaar

Huskens

et al. 2018

Progress in Photovoltaics

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Solar fuels are a promising way to store solar energy seasonally. This paper proposes an earth‐abundant heterostructure to split water using a photovoltaic‐electrochemical device (PV‐EC). The heterostructure is based on a hybrid architecture of a thin‐film (TF) silicon tandem on top of a c‐Si wafer (W) heterojunction solar cell (a‐Si:H (TF)/nc‐Si:H (TF)/c‐Si(W)) The multijunction approach allows to reach enough photovoltage for water splitting, while maximizing the spectrum utilization. However, this unique approach also poses challenges, including the design of effective tunneling recombination junctions (TRJ) and the light management of the cell. Regarding the TRJs, the solar cell performance is improved by increasing the n‐layer doping of the middle cell. The light management can be improved by using hydrogenated indium oxide (IOH) as transparent conductive oxide (TCO). Finally, other light management techniques such as substrate texturing or absorber bandgap engineering were applied to enhance the current density. A correlation was observed between improvements in light management by conventional surface texturing and a reduced nc‐Si:H absorber material quality. The final cell developed in this work is a flat structure, using a top absorber layer consisting of a high bandgap a‐Si:H. This triple junction cell achieved a PV efficiency of 10.57%, with a fill factor of 0.60, an open‐circuit voltage of 2.03 V and a short‐circuit current density of 8.65 mA/cm2. When this cell was connected to an IrOx/Pt electrolyser, a stable solar‐to‐hydrogen (STH) efficiency of 8.3% was achieved and maintained for 10 hours.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Designing a hybrid thin‐film/wafer silicon triple photovoltaic junction for solar water splitting

Perez‐Rodriguez

Vijselaar

Huskens

et al. 2018

Progress in Photovoltaics

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“…They are the single-junction nc-Si:H cell (S), the conventional double-junction a-Si:H/nc-Si:H cell (D), the triple-junction cell with nc-Si:H (TS) or a-SiGe x :H (TG) in the middle subcell, and the quadruple-junction cell with ncSi:H (QS) or a-SiGe x :H (QG) in the third subcell. These structures are chosen for comparison because of their reported use in literature [13,14,29,30] and the different arrangements of the absorber bandgap. This is not an exhaustive list of all reported multijunction configurations, [28,29,31] but sufficiently representative for the purpose of this study.…”

Section: Device Structures and Outlinementioning

confidence: 99%

“…The value was chosen to represent a well-engineered TRJ with a minute amount of voltage drop. [14,28,30,40] The resulted voltage and efficiency are shown in Table 5. Although the loss in voltage linearly increases with the number of TRJ, the loss in efficiency is not as severe when the number of subcells becomes large.…”

Section: Tunnel Recombination Junctionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Too Many Junctions? A Case Study of Multijunction Thin‐Film Silicon Solar Cells

Tong

Isabella

Zeman

2017

Advanced Sustainable Systems

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different energy bandgaps, multijunction solar cells can reduce the thermalization and nonabsorption losses, meaning less spectral mismatch and a better spectral utilization. The theoretical efficiency limit of the solar cell comprising infinite number of component subcells is 68.2% without concentration and 86.8% with concentration. [3] In practice, the III-V photovoltaic technology represents a very successful demonstration of both strategies. [4,5] Within this category, the benefit of multijunction concept is apparent as the record efficiency of concentrator photovoltaic cells is 29.3% for the single-junction, and grows to 34.2%, 44.4%, and 46.0% for the monolithic two-terminal double-, triple-, and quadruple-junction cells, respectively. [6][7][8][9] Multijunction solar cells can be made with two or more external electrical contacts (terminals). The components in a monolithic two-terminal device are considered to be in series connection. Therefore, the output current of a two-terminal device is constrained by the component which supplies the least photocurrent. Despite the limitation, two-terminal multijunction cells are much more feasible to design and manufacture than the ones with more terminals, thus more practical for applications. This type of two-terminal devices is the subject of this paper. For simplicity, we refer two-terminal multijunction solar cells to as multijunction solar cells, without further specification.While the multijunction III-V solar cells mark the highest achieved power conversion efficiency of photovoltaic cells to date, the multijunction concept has been explored and developed in many other photovoltaic technologies as well. Besides the reduction of losses originating from spectral mismatch, the multijunction concept offers some additional benefits to the thin-film photovoltaics. The effective absorption is split into a few separate layers in different subcells, meaning that each layer can be made thinner for the same total absorption. Such thickness reduction improves the electrical performance when the carrier transportation in the material is a limiting factor. Moreover, the division of photocurrent implies less resistive losses over the electrical interconnections. The thin-film silicon solar cell has a long history of developing multijunction solutions to make use of these advantages. The efficiency improvement by additional subcells has been shown up to the triple-junction configuration. [10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17] In organic photovoltaics, the absorber materials have rather narrow absorption spectra.

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The impact of processing conditions and post-deposition oxidation on the opto-electrical properties of hydrogenated amorphous and nano-crystalline Germanium films

Vrijer

Ravichandran

Bouazzata

et al. 2021

Journal of Non-Crystalline Solids

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Quadruple‐Junction Thin‐Film Silicon Solar Cells Using Four Different Absorber Materials

Cited by 7 publications

References 31 publications

Designing a hybrid thin‐film/wafer silicon triple photovoltaic junction for solar water splitting

Designing a hybrid thin‐film/wafer silicon triple photovoltaic junction for solar water splitting

Too Many Junctions? A Case Study of Multijunction Thin‐Film Silicon Solar Cells

The impact of processing conditions and post-deposition oxidation on the opto-electrical properties of hydrogenated amorphous and nano-crystalline Germanium films

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