Highly Efficient Perovskite/Silicon Four-Terminal Tandem Solar Cells and Modules
Mehrdad Najafi a, Dong Zhang a d, Valerio Zardetto a, Lukas Simurka a, Wiljan Verhees a, Henri Fledderus a, Harrie Gorter a, Giulia Lucarelli a, Ilker Dogan a, Klaas Bakker a, Petra Manshanden b, Afshin Hadipour c, Stijn Lammar c, Mirjam Theelen a, Rene Janssen d, Tom Aernouts c, Arthur Weeber b, Bart Geerligs b, Gianluca Coletti b, Sjoerd Veenstra a
a TNO, partner in Solliance, High Tech Campus 21, 5656 AE Eindhoven, The Netherlands
b TNO, Energy Transition, Solar Energy, Westerduinweg 3, 1755 LE Petten, The Netherlands
c Imec, imo-imomec, Thin Film PV Technology – partner in Solliance, Thor Park 8320, 3600 Genk, Belgium
d Molecular Materials and Nanosystems and Institute of Complex Molecular Systems, Eindhoven University of Technology, Partner in Solliance, P.O. Box 513, Eindhoven, 5600 MB, The Netherlands
International Conference on Hybrid and Organic Photovoltaics
Proceedings of International Conference on Hybrid and Organic Photovoltaics (HOPV22)
València, Spain, 2022 May 19th - 25th
Organizers: Pablo Docampo, Eva Unger and Elizabeth Gibson
Oral, Mehrdad Najafi, presentation 046
DOI: https://doi.org/10.29363/nanoge.hopv.2022.046
Publication date: 20th April 2022

Semi-transparent perovskite solar cells (ST-PSCs) are highly attractive to improve the efficiency of commercial silicon (Si) photovoltaic cells and modules in tandem architectures. In this work, efficient 1.6 electron volt  band gap ST-PSCs with an inverted configuration were prepared after optimizing the stack and decreasing the optical and electrical losses, resulting in 20.5% cell efficiency and +29.5% perovskite/c-Si four-terminal tandem cell efficiency. A dual passivation approach was applied to reduce non-radiative recombination losses. First, a series of alkali halides were introduced as additive to the perovskite bulk. Secondly, large organic cations were introduced at the perovskite/electron transport layer (ETL) interface. As a result, compared to 18.1% stabilized power conversion efficiency (PCE) for the reference ST-PSC, a remarkable gain in stabilized PCE of 20.5% was demonstrated. We also highlight that encapsulated devices exhibited the similar or even better photovoltaic performance after keeping them in dark and Nitrogen shelf life condition for more than one year. The ST-PSCs retained 95% of their initial stabilized PCE after 1600h aging at 85°C in a nitrogen atmosphere. The light soak stability test is currently on going and the results are expected after the submission of this abstract. Besides high efficiency, and stability, the development of ST-PSCs for tandem application requires a high near-infrared (NIR)  transparency. The optimized ST-PSCs exhibited NIR transmittance of about 92% (800 nm to 1200 nm) which was accomplished by improving transparent conductive oxide ( TCO ) electrodes quality and tuning the thickness of component layers in the top perovskite cells and using anti-reflective coating layers [1]. For four-terminal tandem application, the ST-PSC (0.09 cm2) with optimized NIR transparency was coupled with a larger Panasonic silicon heterojunction (SHJ) bottom cell  leading to a calculated [2] +29.5% stabilized PCE, with more than 5% absolute efficiency gain with respect to the standalone bottom Si cell. Even more importantly, manufacturing technology of small area devices [3-5] have been transferred to scalable processes, potentially for large volume production. As a result, NIR semi-transparent modules with an aperture area of 100 cm2 were fabricated using the slot-die, evaporation, sputtering and spatial atomic layer deposition (sALD) procedures. The unencapsulated module exhibits a power conversion efficiency of 16.0% on aperture area and 17.3% on active area leading to +25% area matched perovskite/c-Si four-terminal tandem module efficiency. These results can be important step towards the commercialization of perovskite/Si tandem solar cells.

The work is funded by TNO internal funding namely KIP tandem  project and also by PERSPECTIVE ( ID: 1621103), and HIPERXL (ID: 691664) TKI projects from Netherlands Enterpise Agency (RVO) as well as TNO’s Early Research Program project ‘Sustainability and reliability for solar and other (opto-) electronic thin-film devices’ (STAR). The work also is done in collaboration with other Solliance partners; Solliance is a partnership of R&D organizations from the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany working on thin-film photovoltaic solar energy.

© FUNDACIO DE LA COMUNITAT VALENCIANA SCITO
We use our own and third party cookies for analysing and measuring usage of our website to improve our services. If you continue browsing, we consider accepting its use. You can check our Cookies Policy in which you will also find how to configure your web browser for the use of cookies. More info