The development of medium-bandgap solar cell absorber materials is of interest for the design of devices such as tandem solar cells and building-integrated photovoltaics. The recently developed perovskite solar cells can be suitable candidates for these applications. At present, wide bandgap alkylammonium lead bromide perovskite absorbers require a high-temperature sintered mesoporous TiO2 phot...

We fabricated formamidinium lead iodide perovskite solar cell for analysis of the photovoltaic mechanism based on the interpretation of the capacitance variation under illumination. It was shown that the low-frequency capacitance increases proportional to incident light intensity, and in addition it increases proportional to absorber thickness. Furthermore, the voltage dependence of capacitance...

The design and fabrication of a plasmonic black absorber with almost 100% absorbance spanning a broad range of frequencies from ultraviolet (UV) to the near infrared (NIR) is demonstrated. The perfect plasmonic absorber is achieved by a combination of a metal film with suitable metal/dielectric nanocomposites. Our fabrication technique is simple, versatile, cost-effective, and compatible with c...

To bridge the gap between theoretically predicted and experimentally demonstrated efficiencies of solar thermophotovoltaics (STPVs), we consider the impact of spectral non-idealities on the efficiency and the optimal design of STPVs over a range of PV bandgaps (0.45-0.80 eV) and optical concentrations (1-3,000x). On the emitter side, we show that suppressing or recycling sub-bandgap radiation i...

in this paper, the performance evaluation of a two-way hybrid photovoltaic/thermal (pv/t) solar collector was analytically and experimentally carried out. mathematical expressions for operating parameters in glass to glass and glass to tedlar pv/t solar collectors were developed and experimentally validated by a glass to tedlar pv/t solar collector system. also the influence of air flow rate on...

Pure-sulphide Cu2ZnSnS4 (CZTS) thin film solar cells were prepared by a low-cost, non-toxic and high-throughput method based on the thermal decomposition and reaction of sol-gel precursor solution, followed by a high temperature sulfurization process in sulphur atmosphere, which usually gave rise to the unexpected Cu-poor and Zn-rich phase after sulfurization. In order to remove the formation o...

The creation of a suitable inorganic colloidal nanocrystal ink for use in a scalable coating process is a key step in the development of low-cost thin film solar cells. We have developed an innovative method of using copper indium gallium disulfide (CIGS) nanocrystals as the building block for the fabrication of bulk CIGSSe thin films. The CIGS nanocrystal ink solution is applied directly on va...

Materials research with a focus on enhancing the minority-carrier lifetime of the light-absorbing semiconductor is key to advancing solar energy technology for both early-stage and mature material platforms alike. Tin sulfide (SnS) is an absorber material with several clear advantages for manufacturing and deployment, but the record power conversion efficiency remains below 5%. We report measur...