Singlet fission/silicon solar cell exceeding 100% EQE
(Conference Presentation)

Luis M. Pazos; Jumin Lee; Anton Kirch; Maxim Tabachnyk; Richard H. Friend; Bruno Ehrler

doi:10.1117/12.2238225

10 November 2016 Singlet fission/silicon solar cell exceeding 100% EQE (Conference Presentation)

Luis M. Pazos, Jumin Lee, Anton Kirch, Maxim Tabachnyk, Richard H. Friend, Bruno Ehrler

Proceedings Volume 9923, Physical Chemistry of Interfaces and Nanomaterials XV; 992313 (2016) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2238225
Event: SPIE Nanoscience + Engineering, 2016, San Diego, California, United States

Abstract

Current matching limits the commercialization of tandem solar cells due to their instability over spectral changes, leading to the need of using solar concentrators and trackers to keep the spectrum stable. We demonstrate that voltage-matched systems show far higher performance over spectral changes; caused by clouds, dust and other variations in atmospheric conditions. Singlet fission is a process in organic semiconductors which has shown very efficient, 200%, down-conversion yield and the generated excitations are long-lived, ideal for solar cells. As a result, the number of publications has grown exponentially in the past 5 years. Yet, so far no one has achieved to combine singlet fission with most low bandgap semiconductors, including crystalline silicon, the dominating solar cell material with a 90% share of the PV Market. Here we show that singlet fission can facilitate the fabrication of voltage-matched systems, opening a simple design route for the effective implementation of down-conversion in commercially available photovoltaic technologies, with no modification of the electronic circuitry of such. The implemention of singlet fission is achieved simply by decoupling the fabrication of the individual subcells. For this demonstration we used an ITO/PEDOT/P3HT/Pentacene/C60/Ag wide-bandgap subcell, and a commercial silicon solar cell as the low-bandgap component. We show that the combination of the two leads to the first tandem silicon solar cell which exceeds 100% external quantum efficiency.

Conference Presentation

Citation Download Citation

Luis M. Pazos, Jumin Lee, Anton Kirch, Maxim Tabachnyk, Richard H. Friend, and Bruno Ehrler "Singlet fission/silicon solar cell exceeding 100% EQE (Conference Presentation)", Proc. SPIE 9923, Physical Chemistry of Interfaces and Nanomaterials XV, 992313 (10 November 2016); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2238225

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KEYWORDS

Solar cells

External quantum efficiency

Electronic circuits

Silicon solar cells

Atomic, molecular, and optical physics

Clouds

Organic semiconductors

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