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.
GaSb undoped layers grown by molecular-beam epitaxy on GaSb or on semi-insulating GaAs substrates at temperatures between 600 and 630 °C are shown to have carrier concentrations in the low 1013 cm−3 range, corresponding to almost intrinsic conditions. The materials have been characterized using current-voltage, capacitance-voltage, Hall effect, photoluminescence, thermally stimulated current, and secondary-ion mass spectrometry. Bulk GaSb (n type) is also found to have converted to high-resistance p type after a heat treatment at 630 °C. Speculations are offered for the responsible mechanism, but a definitive explanation does not exist at this time.
The effects produced in InAs by hydrogen plasma treatment and proton implantation are discussed. It is shown that both treatments can produce an n-type layer at the surface of p-InAs. For the hydrogen plasma treatment the effect is explained by hydrogen donors complexing with the Be and Zn acceptors and rendering them electrically inactive, thus leaving the residual donors uncompensated. In proton implanted samples the p-n conversion is due to a creation of donor-type lattice defects.
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