Fullerene-Based Transparent Solar Cells with Average Visible Transmission Exceeding 80%

TL;DR

This paper reports the development of fullerene-based transparent solar cells achieving over 80% average visible transmission, a significant improvement in transparency for photovoltaic devices, while maintaining a modest efficiency above 0.3%.

Contribution

The study introduces a novel fullerene-based TPV design with optimized layers that surpass 80% AVT, addressing previous transparency limitations.

Findings

AVT up to 82% achieved

Device efficiency above 0.3% maintained

New design approach for highly transparent TPVs

Abstract

Transparent photovoltaic (TPV) devices have the great potential to apply as smart windows in the construction and agriculture field. The efficiencies of TPVs are growing up quickly in recent years and the champion efficiency even exceeds 10%. However, the transparency is still hard to further improved after the average visible transmission (AVT) achieved 73%. Each component of the TPV devices will influent the transparency of the TPV. To date, the TPV with the AVT over 80% has not been reported yet. In this work, we describe the fullerene-based highly transparent solar cells. The CuSCN/C60 heterojunction is used as the effective light absorber. By finely optimizing the thickness of fullerene films and introducing the highly transparent electrodes, the TPV exhibits the AVT up to 82% while the device efficiency is above 0.3%. This study affords a new avenue to construct highly transparent TPV device.