Progress into power conversion efficiency for solar cells based on nanostructured and realistic spectra

Abstract

To make the solar cell technology more competitive as a source of alternative energy, the study of how to improve its efficiency is essential. The detailed balance efficiency of traditional and one-intermediate band solar cell (one-IBSC) is analyzed by using realistic spectra at AM0 and AM1.5 under various light concentrations. Theoretically, the optimum location for one-IB is investigated to determine the maximum efficiency of one-IBSC. The quantum dot (QD) intermediate band solar cell is studied with the effect of some parameters for QD such as width size (QDW) and barrier thickness (BT) to determine the optimum location of one-IB. The main results conclude that the one-IBSC under AM0 spectrum has maximum balanced efficiencies reached to 45.70% and 63.56% for 1 Sun and maximum light concentration, respectively. While for AM1.5 spectrum these efficiencies are 49.35% and 67.60% with the same conditions of AM0 spectrum. The results also show that the maximum balanced efficiencies for one-IBSC nearly achieved when they are processed by QDs which have the main parameters, QDW and BT. V C 2014 AIP Publishing LLC. [http://dx.

Performance Evaluation of Nanostructured Solar Cells

“…The IBs allow for the absorption of low-energy photons that would otherwise be transmitted through the bulk SCs [44]. In the last decade, there has been an extensive effort to demonstrate the QDIBSCs with a central focus on III-V compound semiconductors [45][46][47][48][49][50][51][52][53]. QDs must be dense to achieve the sufficient photo-absorption in QD layers.…”

“…The reason for improvement of the efficiency in QDIBSCs is mainly that the IB formed among QDs increases absorption of longer wavelength region sunlight and reduces non-radiative combination. Recent studies have shown that efficiencies of QDIBSCs can be improved by using different compositions from III-V semiconductor materials [48][49][50][51][52][53]. It depends essentially on controlling each of the QDs size and the distances between them in the host materials.…”