The lifetime degradation induced by light illumination or carrier injection which is observed in Czochralski-grown silicon (Cz-Si) leads to a significant decrease of solar cell efficiency. In this paper, realistic simulations of industrial type solar cells are performed by a simple empirical expression describing bulk lifetime as a function of the doping concentration. The optimal doping concen...

Faced with an alarming increase of energy consumption on one side, and very limiting amounts of available conventional energy sources on the other, scientists have turned to the most promising, renewable energy sources. Possibilities for the application of solar systems based on photovoltaic conversion of solar energy are very wide, primarily because of their relatively low cost and very import...

Controlling size and shape of materials on the nanoscale allows to engineer their physical properties. Indeed nanomaterials offer unique opportunities in engineering, microelectronics, life-science, and renewable energies. Conversion of sunlight to electricity is assumed to be of major importance for the supply of electrical energy for future generations. The actual photovoltaic market is domin...

Advances in the efficiency of crystalline silicon (c-Si) photovoltaic (PV) devices above the long-held record efficiency value of 25% have all come from solar cell architectures with passivated contacts fabricated on n-type silicon.[1] The most successful devices to date have a silicon heterojunction (SHJ) cell structure, featuring a thin intrinsic amorphous silicon (a-Si) film that passivates ...

Silicon Solar Cells In article number 2201512, Zengguang Huang and colleagues prepared Al-doped TiO2 (ATO) thin films by atomic-layers-deposited (ALD) technique. The were observed to possess the highest minority carrier lifetime of 253.0 μs a significantly low contact resistivity ρc 19.7 mΩ cm2 on solar-grade silicon. A efficiency 19.9% was obtained for an n-type c-Si solar cell with full-area ...

Thin film silicon tandem junction solar cells based on amorphous silicon (a-Si:H) and microcrystalline silicon (lc-Si:H) were developed with focus on high open-circuit voltages for the application as photocathodes in integrated photoelectrochemical cells for water electrolysis. By adjusting various parameters in the plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition process of the individual lc-Si:H sin...

We have previously reported on the successful deposition of heterojunction solar cells whose thin intrinsic crystalline absorber layer is grown using the standard radio frequency plasma enhanced chemical vapour deposition process at 165 ◦C on highly doped P-type (100) crystalline silicon substrates. The structure had an N-doped hydrogenated amorphous silicon emitter deposited on top of the intr...

We report the design, optimization, and experimental results of large area commercial silicon solar cell based thermophotovoltaic (TPV) energy conversion systems. Using global non-linear optimization tools, we demonstrate theoretically a maximum radiative heat-to-electricity efficiency of 6.4% and a corresponding output electrical power density of 0.39 W cm(-2) at temperature T = 1660 K when im...

After 60 years of research, silicon solar cell efficiency saturated close to the theoretical limit, and radically new approaches are needed to further improve the efficiency. The use of tandem systems raises this theoretical power conversion efficiency limit from 34% to 45%. We present the advantageous spectral stability of using voltage-matched tandem solar cells with respect to their traditio...