Title :
Suitability of InP window layers for InGaAs solar cells
Author_Institution :
NASA Lewis Res. Center, Cleveland, OH, USA
Abstract :
Window layers help in reducing the surface recombination at the emitter surface of the solar cells resulting in significant improvement in energy conversion efficiency. Indium gallium arsenide (In/sub x/Ga/sup 1-x/As) and related materials based solar cells are quite promising for photovoltaic and thermophotovoltaic applications. The flexibility of the change in the bandgap energy and the growth of InGaAs on different substrates makes this material very attractive for multi-bandgap energy, multi-junction solar cell approaches. The high efficiency and better radiation performance of the solar cell structures based on InGaAs make them suitable for space power applications. This work investigates the suitability of indium phosphide (InP) window layers for lattice-matched In/sub 0.53/Ga/sub 0.47/As (bandgap energy 0.74 eV) solar cells. We present the first data on the effects of the p-type InP window layer on p-on-n lattice-matched InGaAs solar cells. The modeled quantum efficiency results show a significant improvement in the blue region with the InP window. The bare InGaAs solar cell performance suffers due to high surface recombination velocity (10/sup 7/ cm/s). The large band discontinuity at the InP/InGaAs heterojunction offers a great potential barrier to minority carriers. The calculated results demonstrate that the InP window layer effectively passivates the solar cell front surface, hence resulting in reduced surface recombination and therefore, significantly improving the performance of the InGaAs solar cell.
Keywords :
III-V semiconductors; energy gap; gallium compounds; indium compounds; minority carriers; passivation; semiconductor device models; solar cells; surface recombination; 0.74 eV; InP-InGaAs; InP-InGaAs heterojunction; band discontinuity; bandgap energy; blue region; emitter surface; energy conversion efficiency; minority carrier; p-on-n lattice-matched InGaAs solar cell; passivation; potential barrier; quantum efficiency; solar cell performance; surface recombination velocity; thermophotovoltaic application; window layer;
Conference_Titel :
Photovoltaic Energy Conversion, 2003. Proceedings of 3rd World Conference on
Conference_Location :
Osaka, Japan
Print_ISBN :
4-9901816-0-3