2017/07/21 by Akihiro Nakane, Shohei Fujimoto, Hiroyuki Fujiwara · 18 citations
Engineering · Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Carrier lifetime #Common emitter #Heterojunction #Polymer solar cell #Quantum dot solar cell #Quantum efficiency #Silicon #Silicon Nanostructures and Photoluminescence #Silicon and Solar Cell Technologies #Solar cell #Theory of solar cells #Thin-Film Transistor Technologies #cond-mat.mtrl-sci #physics.app-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1063/1.4997063
published in Journal of Applied Physics 122(20) (American Institute of Physics) · 27 pages, 13 figures
arxiv created 2017/07/21 · openalex created_date 2017/08/31 · openalex publication_date 2017/11/22 · arxiv updated 2017/12/06 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
A quite general device analysis method that allows the direct evaluation of optical and recombination losses in crystalline silicon (c-Si)-based solar cells has been developed. By applying this technique, the current loss mechanisms of the state-of-the-art solar cells with ∼20% efficiencies have been revealed. In the established method, the optical and electrical losses are characterized from the analysis of an experimental external quantum efficiency (EQE) spectrum with very low computational cost. In particular, we have performed the EQE analyses of textured c-Si solar cells by employing the experimental reflectance spectra obtained directly from the actual devices while using flat optical models without any fitting parameters. We find that the developed method provides almost perfect fitting to EQE spectra reported for various textured c-Si solar cells, including c-Si heterojunction solar cells, a dopant-free c-Si solar cell with a MoOx layer, and an n-type passivated emitter with rear locally diffused solar cell. The modeling of the recombination loss further allows the extraction of the minority carrier diffusion length and surface recombination velocity from the EQE analysis. Based on the EQE analysis results, the current loss mechanisms in different types of c-Si solar cells are discussed.