Issue 12, 2011

Resistive and thermal scale effects for Cu(In, Ga)Se2 polycrystalline thin film microcells under concentration

Abstract

Using solar cells under concentrated illumination is known to improve the conversion efficiency while diminishing the active area, and thus material consumption. Recent concentrator cell designs tend to go to smaller devices, in the 0.5–1mm lateral range, enabling a better thermal evacuation due to higher surface to volume ratio. If the cell size is further reduced to the micrometric range, spreading resistance losses can be made vanishingly small. This is particularly interesting for thin film technology which has been limited up to now to very low concentrations, 1–10 suns, due to excessive resistive losses of the window layer and difficult thermal management of the cells, grown on glass substrates. In order to prove that high injection regime can be implemented on polycrystalline thin film solar cells, we fabricated Cu(In, Ga)Se2 (CIGS) thin film microcells with diameter from 7 μm to 150 μm, and characterized them under concentrated illumination. A 4% absolute efficiency increase is obtained at 120 suns, and current densities as high as 100 A cm−2 can be measured, without affecting the cell performances. The temperature increase under high fluxes is drastically reduced in microcells: less than 20 K at 1000 suns for microcells under 50 μm in diameter. These results show that the use of polycrystalline thin films under high concentration is indeed possible, with important technological consequences.

Graphical abstract: Resistive and thermal scale effects for Cu(In, Ga)Se2 polycrystalline thin film microcells under concentration

Article information

Article type
Paper
Submitted
07 May 2011
Accepted
10 Aug 2011
First published
06 Sep 2011

Energy Environ. Sci., 2011,4, 4972-4977

Resistive and thermal scale effects for Cu(In, Ga)Se2 polycrystalline thin film microcells under concentration

M. Paire, A. Shams, L. Lombez, N. Péré-Laperne, S. Collin, J. Pelouard, J. Guillemoles and D. Lincot, Energy Environ. Sci., 2011, 4, 4972 DOI: 10.1039/C1EE01661J

To request permission to reproduce material from this article, please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

If you are an author contributing to an RSC publication, you do not need to request permission provided correct acknowledgement is given.

If you are the author of this article, you do not need to request permission to reproduce figures and diagrams provided correct acknowledgement is given. If you want to reproduce the whole article in a third-party publication (excluding your thesis/dissertation for which permission is not required) please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

Read more about how to correctly acknowledge RSC content.

Social activity

Spotlight

Advertisements