Ultrathin microcrystalline hydrogenated Si/Ge alloyed tandem solar cells towards full solar spectrum conversion

Abstract

Thin film solar cells have been proved the next generation photovoltaic devices due to their low cost, less material consumption and easy mass production. Among them, micro-crystalline Si and Ge based thin film solar cells have advantages of high efficiency and ultrathin absorber layers. Yet individual junction devices are limited in photoelectric conversion efficiency because of the restricted solar spectrum range for its specific absorber. In this work, we designed and simulated a multi-junction solar cell with its four sub-cells selectively absorbing the full solar spectrum including the ultraviolet, green, red as well as near infrared range, respectively. By tuning the Ge content, the record efficiency of 24.80% has been realized with the typical quadruple junction structure of a-Si:H/a-Si_0.9Ge_0.1:H/µc-Si:H/µc-Si_0.5Ge_0.5:H. To further reduce the material cost, thickness dependent device performances have been conducted. It can be found that the design of total thickness of 4 mm is the optimal device design in balancing the thickness and the PCE. While the design of ultrathin quadruple junction device with total thickness of 2 mm is the optimized device design regarding cost and long-term stability with a little bit more reduction in PCE. These results indicated that our solar cells combine the advantages of low cost and high stability. Our work may provide a general guidance rule of utilizing the full solar spectrum for developing high efficiency and ultrathin multi-junction solar cells.

Graphical abstract

Keywords

thin films / solar cells / quadruple junction solar cell / amorphous silicon / silicon germanium alloy / quantum efficiency

References

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Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge Prof. A. Rockett and Dr. Yiming Liu from UIUC and Prof. Fonash of PSU for providing the wxAMPS program. This research was carried out with the support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 51772049), the Jilin Scientific and Technological Development Program, China (Grant No. 20170520159JH) and the ‘Thirteenth Five-Year’ Scientific and Technological Research Project of the Education Department of Jilin Province, China (Grant No. JJKH20190705KJ), the project of Jilin Development and Reform Commission (Grant No. 2019C042). The authors also show their gratitude to the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 51802116) and the Natural Science Foundation of Shandong Province (No. ZR2019BEM040). J.P. acknowledges the National Key Research and Development Program of China (Grant No. 2017YFE0102700) from the Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) of China and the Key Research and Development program of Shandong Province (Major Innovation Project of Science and Technology of Shandong Province) (No. 2018YFJH0503) and the University of Jinan for the Scientific Research Starting Funds.

Electronic Supplementary Material

Supplementary material is available in the online version of this article at https://doi.org/10.1007/s11705-019-1906-0 and is accessible for authorized users.

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