Anti-radiation of space triple-junction solar cell based on distributed Bragg reflector structure

Abstract

At present, solar cells are the main sources for spacecrafts. For a long time the bulk of the space power installations has been the solar arrays based on single junction silicon and gallium arsenide solar cells. In recent years a trend has been the active use of triple-junction GaAs solar cell with higher efficiency instead of single junction solar cells. One of the most important characteristics of solar cells used in spacecrafts is the resistance to radiation damages caused by high energy particles of the near-Earth space. According to the spectral response of triple-junction GaAs solar cell and the damage characteristics of the current under the condition of electron irradiation, the physical mechanism of cell attenuation can be determined: the current degradation originates mainly from the GaInAs subcells. These damages form additional centers of nonradiative recombination, which results in the reduction of the minority charge carrier diffusion lengths and in degradation of the solar cells photocurrent.The radiation damage caused by the electron irradiation will shorten the diffusion length of the base region and affect the collection of photo generated carriers. The ways of improving absorption of long wavelength light in GaInAs subcells with a thin base in using the distributed Bragg reflector can be investigated by the mathematical simulation method based on calculating the light propagation in a multilayer structure by means of the TFCalc software which can design optical structure. To estimate the validity of these methods for solar cells structures with distributed Bragg reflector, the spectral dependences of the photoresponse and the reflection coefficient with different base thickness values are calculated and compared with experimental results. Based on the physical mechanism of the degradation, the thickness of middle subcell base layer is reduced, and an appropriate structure of the distributed Bragg reflector is simulated by the TFCalc software. As a result, the new structure solar cells are that the thickness of the base layer is 1.5 m compared with the different middle subcell thickness values, and the distributed Bragg reflector structure with 15 paris of the Al0.1Ga0.9As/Al0.9Ga0.1As with 850 nm central wavelength is embedded in the middle subcell of the base layer, the distributed Bragg reflector has a highest reflectivity of more than 97% in the actual test, and a bandwidth of 94 nm, which can satisfy design requirement. After irradiating the new structure of solar cells, the decay of its short-circuited current is reduced by 50% compared with that of the original structure, and the remaining efficiency factor is increased by 2.3%.