Efficiency enhancement of silicon solar cells through a downshifting and antireflective oxysulfide phosphor layer

Improved photovoltaic performance of monocrystalline silicon solar cell through luminescent down‐converting Gd2O2S:Tb3+ phosphor

“…Moreover, the solar cell coated with the EVA/Gd 2 O 2 S:Tb 3+ composite layer shows overall higher EQE value than the bare cell across the entire wavelengths range of 300 to 1100 nm, and a maximum relative enhancement over 19% in the UV regions was observed, indicating explicitly that the increase in photocurrent is mostly arisen from the enhanced absorption of UV photons by the Gd 2 O 2 S:Tb 3+ phosphors. Since a large proportion of electron‐hole pairs derived from absorbing high energy photons usually situated near the solar cell surface, the photo‐generated carriers subsequently consume and disappear easily through their recombination because of the surface defects, which may in turn give rise to inferior carrier collection possibilities . Nevertheless, with the presence of the phosphor particles on the front surface of mono‐Si solar cell, a greater number of photons can be absorbed closer to the depletion region for photo‐current generation as soon as the UV photons are luminescent converted to the visible region of solar spectrum.…”

“…In a down‐conversion (DC) process, a high‐energy incident photon is absorbed by the DC phosphors and re‐emitted as two or more lower energy photons at wavelengths where the silicon solar cells exhibit a strong spectral response . A number of researchers have shown that there is significant enhancement in conversion efficiency of solar PV devices by integrating a down‐converting or luminescent down‐shifting (LDS) layer on the top surface of c‐Si solar cells …”

Cooling solar cells using ZnO nanoparticles as a down-shifter

“…Hung and Chen [11] used antireflection-coating (ARC) of submicron spherical Europium-doped gadolinium oxysulfide (Gd 2 O 2 S:Eu 3+ ) phosphor impregnated in a polyvinylpyrrolidone (PVP) matrix on the surface of the polycrystalline silicon (pc-Si) solar cell, which achieved about 2.75% enhancement in energy conversion efficiency.…”

Photon Converters for Photovoltaics

“…[41] Rare-earths doped encapsulants have also led to sizeable improvements in the field. Although initial studies were limited by the use of free lanthanide ions with low absorption coefficients, [76] this problem was later circumvented by incorporating Eu III coordination complexes or Eu II or Eu III phosphores such as BaSiO 4 :Eu II [77] or Gd 2 O 2 S:Eu III in the LDS sheet, [78] the later leading to an increase in short-current density by 6.74 mA/cm 2 , which corresponds of a +2.76% relative increase in power conversion efficiency on polycrystalline silicon solar cell. One of the first example of the use of Eu III coordination complexes for LDS materials was reported by Fukuda et al, where they used [Eu(tta) 3 phen] (Table 2) doped encapsulants (PVA, silica glasses or acryl resins) on c-Si PV modules.…”