Standard solar cells heat up under sunlight. The resulting increased temperature of the solar cell has adverse consequences on both its efficiency and its reliability. We introduce a general approach to radiatively lower the operating temperature of a solar cell through sky access, while maintaining its solar absorption. We first present an ideal scheme for the radiative cooling of solar cells....

Current solar cell technology is based in the photovoltaic effect occurring in semiconductor materials. It is well-known that the conversion efficiency of these types of solar cells is theoretically limited as first noted by Shockley and Queisser (S&Q): a crystalline silicon device is limited to a conversion efficiency of 33.7 %. The theoretical limit of an infinite multi-junction cell is 86 %....

Most photovoltaic (solar) cells are made from crystalline silicon (c-Si), which has an indirect band gap. This gives rise to weak absorption of one-third of usable solar photons. Therefore, improved light trapping schemes are needed, particularly for c-Si thin film solar cells. Here, a photonic crystal-based light-trapping approach is analyzed and compared to previous approaches. For a solar ce...

Silicon nanowire possesses great potential as the material for renewable energy harvesting and conversion. The significantly reduced spectral reflectivity of silicon nanowire to visible light makes it even more attractive in solar energy applications. However, the benefit of its use for solar thermal energy harvesting remains to be investigated and has so far not been clearly reported. The purp...

It is known that silicon is an indirect band gap material, reducing its efficiency in photovoltaic applications. Using surface plasmons in metallic nanoparticles embedded in a solar cell has recently been proposed as a way to increase the efficiency of thin-film silicon solar cells. The dipole mode that dominates the plasmons in small particles produces an electric field having Fourier componen...

Available online 27 May 2013

Silicon wafer thickness reduction without increasing the wafer strength leads to a high fracture rate during subsequent handling and processing steps. Cracking of solar cells has become one of the major sources of solar module failure and rejection. Hence, it is important to evaluate the mechanical strength of solar cells and factors influencing this. The purpose of this work is to understand t...

A comprehensive study of the plasmonic thin-film solar cell with the periodic strip structure is presented in this paper. The finite-difference frequency-domain method is employed to discretize the inhomogeneous wave function for modeling the solar cell. In particular, the hybrid absorbing boundary condition and the one-sided difference scheme are adopted. The parameter extraction methods for t...