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

• Published in: IEEE transactions on electron devices 2021-04, Vol.68 (4), p.1676-1681
• Main Authors: Chatterji, Nithin, Bhatia, Swasti, Kumar, Anil, Antony, Aldrin, Nair, Pradeep R.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Computer architecture; Degradation; Efficiency; Field-effect solar cells; High temperature; light and elevated temperature-induced degradation (LeTID); Logic gates; Low temperature; Mathematical model; passivated emitter rear cell (PERC); Passivation; Photovoltaic cells; Radiative recombination; Recovery; semiconductor device modeling; Solar cells
• ISSN: 0018-9383; 1557-9646
• DOI: 10.1109/TED.2021.3056954

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 c-Si 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 suboptimal-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 photovoltaics (PV) community.