Title :
Toward a 25%-efficient polycrystalline thin-film tandem solar cell: practical issues
Author :
Noufi, R. ; Young, D.L. ; Coutts, T.J. ; Gessert, T. ; Ward, J.S. ; Duda, A. ; Wu, X. ; Romero, M. ; Dhere, Ramesh ; Abu Shama, J.
Author_Institution :
Nat. Renewable Energy Lab., Golden, CO, USA
Abstract :
In this paper, we describe our efforts to date to evaluate possible routes, combination of materials, and device structures toward demonstrating a multijunction polycrystalline thin-film tandem solar cell with efficiency greater than 25%. Our approach uses modeling as a guide to calculate an approximate upper limit of device performance, the range of band gap pairs for top and bottom cells, and the optical resources/losses through the multilayer structure. The combination of materials we chose for the initial study are based on state-of-the-art single junction devices utilizing Cu(In,Ga)Se/sub 2/ and CdTe absorbers.
Keywords :
II-VI semiconductors; cadmium compounds; copper compounds; energy gap; gallium compounds; indium compounds; optical losses; semiconductor device models; semiconductor junctions; semiconductor thin films; solar cells; ternary semiconductors; 25 percent; CdTe; Cu(InGa)Se/sub 2/; band gap; device performance; device structure; modeling; multilayer structure; optical losses; optical resource; polycrystalline thin-film tandem solar cell; solar cell with efficiency;
Conference_Titel :
Photovoltaic Energy Conversion, 2003. Proceedings of 3rd World Conference on
Conference_Location :
Osaka, Japan
Print_ISBN :
4-9901816-0-3
