Operating Perovskite Solar Cell under Concentrated Solar Light

A recent forecast suggested that solar cell industry will contribute nearly one third of new electricity generation capacity worldwide by the year 2030.[1] Silicon solar cell is the most widely used photovoltaic device nowadays. However, opportunities exist for technologies that advance either higher efficiencies or lower fabrication cost in the silicon solar cell. Thus, the emergence of organic–inorganic halide perovskite based solar cell has attracted much attention during the past few years. Compared with traditional silicon solar cell, the perovskite solar cell has a lower cost and is easy to fabricate. Additionally, the high potential is another feature that catches peoples’ eyes. With the first perovskite solar cell reported in 2009 with power conversion efficiency of 3.8%. A record efficiency of 21.0% was achieved by researchers at EPFL in late 2015.[2] However, the instability of perovskite solar cell at high temperature reduces the performance. Modern solar cell design often uses lens to concentrate solar light in order to produce higher power from small area of solar cells. Nevertheless, part of the solar power will be converted into heat and increase the temperature of the cell. When it comes to perovskite solar cell, the concentrated solar light gives rise to considerable temperature increase of the glass substrate and causes significant degradation of the perovskite layer. Thus, figuring out the performance of perovskite solar cell under evaluated temperature and the temperature raise according to different incident light intensity are important jobs for designing concentrator solar cells. In this thesis, the transmittance and reflectance were simulated by Lumerical FDTD software to calculate the absorbance of perovskite solar cell under different incident light intensity. The temperature evaluation was then calculated by Ansys Mechanical software to find out the relation between incident light power and temperature increase. To characterize the performance of perovskite solar cell under different temperature, the I-V curve and incident photon-to-current efficiency (IPCE) were measured under various temperature conditions. By comparing the temperature-light intensity correlation, IPCE performance and I-V curve, the suitable incident solar light intensity for operating perovskite solar cell was found