Abstract
Approaching the first terawatt of installations, photovoltaics (PV) are about to become the major source of electric power until the mid-century. The technology has proven to be long lasting and very versatile and today PV modules can be found in numerous applications. This is a great success of the entire community, but taking future growth for granted might be dangerous. Scientists have recently started to call for accelerated innovation and cost reduction. Here, we show how ultrathin absorber layers, only a few nanometers in thickness, together with strong light confinement can be used to address new applications for photovoltaics. We review the basics of this new type of solar cell and point out the requirements to the absorber layer material by optical simulation. Furthermore, we discuss innovative applications, which make use of the unique optical properties of the nano absorber solar cell architecture, such as spectrally selective PV and switchable photovoltaic windows.
Highlights
Thin film photovoltaics (PV) technology has been developed as an alternative to crystalline-silicon-wafer-based technology (c-Si), mainly because of concerns related to the return of energy and material restrictions [1]
This enormous reduction in thickness is possible, mainly because the direct bandgap semiconductor materials Cadmium Telluride (CdTe), Cupper Indium Gallium Selenide (CIGS), and amorphous Silicon (a-Si) possess substantially higher absorption coefficients compared to the indirect bandgap crystalline silicon (c-Si)
In this paper we reviewed our status on ultrathin resonant-cavity-enhanced solar cells and its novel applications in semi-transparent PV
Summary
Thin film photovoltaics (PV) technology has been developed as an alternative to crystalline-silicon-wafer-based technology (c-Si), mainly because of concerns related to the return of energy and material restrictions [1] Even though these restrictions are questionable today, it is still impressive that the ~100 μm thick c-Si absorber can be replaced by thin films of ~1 μm thickness [2]. It quickly became clear that this new PV architecture brings about a new degree of freedom, the light confinement, with which the cell can be adapted for specific applications [16] This is because in the cavity enhanced nano absorber PV, it is not the spectral distribution of the absorption coefficient that determines the optical properties of the PV cell, but it is the spectral response of the cavity. We will review the concept of the cavity enhanced nano absorber PV and show, by means of two applications, how the design of the optical cavity leads to innovative new PV solutions
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