Carbon-Protected BiVO4—Cu2O Thin Film Tandem Cell for Solar Water Splitting Applications

Efficient water-splitting device based on a bismuth vanadate photoanode and thin-film silicon solar cells.

A hybrid photovoltaic/photoelectrochemical (PV/PEC) water-splitting device with a benchmark solar-to-hydrogen conversion efficiency of 5.2% under simulated air mass (AM) 1.5 illumination is reported. This cell consists of a gradient-doped tungsten-bismuth vanadate (W:BiVO4 ) photoanode and a thin-film silicon solar cell. The improvement with respect to an earlier cell that also used gradient-do...

Effect of Annealing on Physical Properties of Cu2ZnSnS4 (CZTS) Thin Films for Solar Cell Applications

Cu2ZnSnS4 (CZTS) thin films were prepared by directly sputteringCu (In,Ga)Se2 quaternary target consisting of (Cu: 25%, Zn: 12.5%, Sn; 12.5%and S: 50%). The composition and structure of CZTS layers have beeninvestigated after annealing at 200 0C, 350 0C and 500 0C under vacuum. Theresults show that recrystallization of the CZTS thin film occurs and increasingthe grain size with a preferred orie...

Innovative Elastic Thin-Film Solar Cell Structures

Thin-film Silicon Solar Cells for Space Applications: Radiation Hardness and Applications for an Integrated Solant (solar Cell - Antenna) Module

A new device called “Solant” (for SOLar cell – ANTenna) is presented in this paper. It is a combination of thin-film amorphous silicon solar cells and flat printed antennas. A proton irradiation campaign has also been carried out on a series of n-i-p amorphous and p-i-n micromorph [microcrystalline (μc-Si:H) and amorphous (a-Si:H)] silicon tandem solar cells. The effect of thermal annealing on ...

Pentacene-carbon nanotubes: Semiconducting assemblies for thin-film transistor applications

We demonstrate an alternative path for achieving high-transconductance organic transistors by assembling bilayers of pentacene onto random arrays of single-walled carbon nanotubes. We show here that, by varying the connectivity of the underlying nanotube network, the channel length of a thin-film transistor can be reduced by nearly two orders of magnitude—thus, enabling the increase of the devi...