Study of Submerged Mono-and Poly-Crystalline Silicon Solar Cells with Split Spectral Ranges Using Optical Filters

Abstract

Investigating submerged Solar Photovoltaics (SPV) has significant benefits in harvesting the useful amount of underwater solar energy. Earlier, the authors analysed the amorphous, mono- and poly-crystalline silicon solar cells with varying underwater conditions (Enaganti 2020). The findings indicated that SPV has a wide potential to utilize in underwater conditions for diverse applications. This has motivated us to explore the behaviour of solar cells underwater considering other parameters, like solar spectral range, as well. Evidently, the solar spectral range gets narrower and the solar radiation gets reduced in underwater conditions with an increasing in water depths. Herein, the performance of mono- and poly-crystalline silicon solar cells has been investigated underwater with varying regions of the spectral ranges from the Standard AM 1.5 solar simulator using optical colour glass filters. The obtained results manifest that even with the limited spectral ranges, mono- and polycrystalline solar cells showed 44.8% and 39.34% decrease in the maximum power output respectively at 20 cm water depth using band pass filter. This power decay was witnessed to be very less compared to the other filters and also without using filter as the water readily absorbs the IR portion of the light.