Incident Angle and Light Intensity Variation: a Comparative Impact Study on Perovskite, Dye-sensitized and Silicon Heterojunction Solar Cells Towards Building-Integrated Applications

Abstract

To make the concept of building-integrated solar cells viable, the latter should possess an increased tolerance towards light incident angle and intensity that naturally change along the day, among other required properties. In this work, three solar cell technologies as candidates for building-integrated applications are compared regarding their normalized average efficiency as a function of light intensity and incident angle. The mechanisms that lead to higher efficiency independence are evidenced by comparing several cell designs for dye-sensitized solar cells (DSC) and perovskite solar cells (PSC). By doing so, it was found that superior efficiency independence towards tilted light is obtained for PSC with more transparent active layers due to optical path lengthening (OPL), while DSC were found to exhibit OPL in standard configuration. All cells show a fairly stable efficiency evolution when light intensity was reduced, while at lower light intensity PSC slightly outperform DSC. The almost constant relative efficiency evolution of silicon heterojunction (SHJ) solar cells is a very interesting outcome of this work and so far, efficiency evolution of such SHJ under low light intensity have not been reported in the literature to the best of our knowledge.