Material and Process Tolerant High Efficiency Solar Cells with Dynamic Recovery of Performance

TL;DR

This paper proposes a novel solar cell architecture with a control gate that maintains high efficiency despite material and process imperfections, enabling low-cost, stable, and dynamically recoverable solar cells suitable for broad PV applications.

Contribution

Introduction of a control-gate solar cell design that achieves high efficiency under sub-optimal conditions and allows dynamic performance recovery during operation.

Findings

Achieves high efficiency with sub-optimal back-surface passivation

Enables low temperature fabrication processes

Provides dynamic recovery of performance during long-term operation

Abstract

Low cost, highly efficient, and stable solar cells demand low temperature processing, less stringent criteria on materials, and possibility of dynamic recovery from long term degradation: a combination of features unachievable from the perspectives of current cSi technology. To this end, here we propose a novel solar cell architecture with an additional control gate. Our simulation results indicate that the proposed device can achieve excellent efficiency even if the back-surface passivation is sub-optimal; thus allowing exploration of a wide variety of materials and low temperature fabrication processes. Importantly, such solar cells can dynamically offset efficiency loss due to elevated temperature and interface degradation associated with long term field operation and hence could be of broad interest to the PV community.