Related papers: Theoretical Efficiency Comparison between Carrier …
We describe surface patterning strategies that permit high photon-collection efficiency together with high carrier-collection efficiency in an ultra-thin planar heterojunction organic photovoltaic cell. Optimized designs reach up to 50%…
The hot carrier dynamics and its effect on the device performance of GaAs solar cell and InAs/GaAs quantum dot solar cell (QDSC) was investigated. At first, the fundamental operation feature of conventional hot carrier solar cell was…
Taking into account the temperature gradients in solar cells, it is shown that their efficiency can be increased beyond the Shockley-Queisser limit (J. Appl. Phys. 32 (1961) 510). The driving force for this gain is the temperature gradient…
The thermodynamic limit of photovoltaic efficiency for a single-junction solar cell can be readily predicted using the bandgap of the active light absorbing material. Such an approach overlooks the energy loss due to non-radiative…
Light trapping for solar cells can reduce production cost and improve energy conversion efficiency. Understanding some of the basic theoretical constraints on light trapping is therefore of fundamental importance. Here, we develop a general…
Charge separation in light-harvesting complexes occurs in a pair of tightly coupled chlorophylls at the heart of photosynthetic reaction centers of both plants and bacteria. Recently it has been shown that quantum coherence can, in…
We present a new outlook on the climate system thermodynamics, studying some of its macroscopic properties in terms of the 1st and 2nd laws of thermodynamics. We review and clarify the notion of efficiency of the climate system by…
The current state of the art in direct water splitting in photo-electrochemical cells (PECs) is presented together with: (i) a case study of water splitting using a simple solar cell with the most efficient water splitting electrodes and…
A high theoretical efficiency of 47.2% was achieved by a novel combination of In0.51Ga0.49P, GaAs, In0.24Ga0.76As and In0.19Ga0.81Sb subcell layers in a simulated quadruple junction solar cell under 1 sun concentration. The electronic…
Hot carrier solar cell is proposed where charge carriers are cooled adiabatically in the charge transport layers adjoining the absorber. The device resembles an ideal thermoelectric converter where thermopower, and therefore also carrier…
A theoretical model using electron-phonon scattering rate equations is developed for assessing carrier thermalization under steady-state conditions in two-dimensional systems. The model is applied to investigate the hot carrier effect in…
Electrical transients enabled by optical excitation and electric detection provide a distinctive opportunity to study the charge transport, recombination and even the hysteresis of a solar cell in a much wider time window ranging from…
Numerical and semi-analytical models are presented for photon-enhanced-thermionic-emission (PETE) devices. The models take diffusion of electrons, inhomogeneous photogeneration, and bulk and surface recombination into account. The…
Selective extraction of photo-generated carriers is a fundamental challenge in solar cells which is usually achieved through junctions with the associated doping as well as band offset differences. In this context, here we propose a new…
Charge separation properties, that is the ability of a chromophore, or a chromophore/semiconductor interface, to separate charges upon light absorption, are crucial characteristics for an efficient photovoltaic device. Starting from this…
The incoherence of sunlight has long been suspected to have an impact on solar cell energy conversion efficiency, although the extent of this is unclear. Existing computational methods used to optimize solar cell efficiency under incoherent…
Practical device architectures are proposed here for the implementation of three-terminal heterojunction bipolar transistor solar cells (3T-HBTSCs). These photovoltaic devices, which have a potential efficiency similar to that of…
We demonstrate that efficient and nearly field-independent charge separation in organic planar heterojunction solar cells can be described by an incoherent hopping mechanism. We model the separation efficiency of electron-hole pairs created…
Multiple exciton generation solar cells (MEGSCs) undergo low efficiency due to material imperfections such as nonradiative recombination This paper introduces alternative approaches for realizing photovoltaic (PV) devices similar to MEGSCs.…
To absorb the photons below the band-gap energy effectively, we proposed a quantum dot (QD) photocell modeled by multi-level system for the quantum yields and photo-to-charge efficiency limits. The theoretical results show the quantum…