Kurinec Santosh K. - Emerging Photovoltaic Materials

1. Preface
2. Chapter 1
3. Chapter 2
4. Chapter 3
5. Chapter 4
6. Chapter 5
7. Chapter 6
8. Chapter 7
9. Chapter 8
10. Chapter 9
11. Chapter 10
12. Chapter 11
13. Chapter 12
14. Chapter 13
15. Chapter 14
16. Chapter 15
17. Chapter 16
18. Chapter 17
19. Chapter 18
20. Chapter 19

1. Chapter 1
2. Chapter 2
3. Chapter 3
4. Chapter 4
5. Chapter 5
6. Chapter 6
7. Chapter 8
8. Chapter 9
9. Chapter 10
10. Chapter 12
11. Chapter 15
12. Chapter 17
13. Chapter 18
14. Chapter 19

Scrivener Publishing
100 Cummings Center, Suite 541J
Beverly, MA 01915

Publishers at Scrivener
Martin Scrivener ()
Phillip Carmical ()

Managing Editors: George Mishra and Sophie Thompson

Edited by

Santosh K. Kurinec

Rochester Institute of Technology, NY, USA

This edition first published 2018 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA and Scrivener Publishing LLC, 100 Cummings Center, Suite 541J, Beverly, MA 01915, USA
2019 Scrivener Publishing LLC

For more information about Scrivener publications please visit www.scrivenerpublishing.com.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except as permitted by law. Advice on how to obtain permission to reuse material from this title is available at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions.

Wiley Global Headquarters
111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA

For details of our global editorial offices, customer services, and more information about Wiley products visit us at www.wiley.com.

Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty
While the publisher and authors have used their best efforts in preparing this work, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this work and specifically disclaim all warranties, including without limitation any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives, written sales materials, or promotional statements for this work. The fact that an organization, website, or product is referred to in this work as a citation and/or potential source of further information does not mean that the publisher and authors endorse the information or services the organization, website, or product may provide or recommendations it may make. This work is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a specialist where appropriate. Neither the publisher nor authors shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages. Further, readers should be aware that websites listed in this work may have changed or disappeared between when this work was written and when it is read.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

ISBN 978-1-119-40754-6

The global solar market grew by 26% in 2017. According to research, the installed grid-connected photovoltaics (PV) capacity is approaching 100 gigawatts (Source: GTM Research Data Hub). The cost of solar power has declined at a rate of approximately 12% annually over the last five years. Such cost reductions are driven by continuous technological developments in achieving higher solar PV module efficiencies with improved manufacturing processes. To keep up with the increasing demand and achieve high energy return on energy invested (EROI), it is necessary for researchers to strive for lower costs, higher efficiencies and longer lifetime of PV technologies.

Semiconductors are materials that generate free carriers (such as Si and GaAs) or excitons (in organics, which are dissociated to form free carriers) when exposed to photons with energies exceeding their optical bandgaps. These excess carriers are swept via a built-in electric field in the device and extracted at the contacts, which can drive a load and provide useful power output. Photovoltaic (PV) devices and modules made from crystalline silicon currently dominate the market. In the continued quest for lowering the cost, many efforts are being pursued that involve the use of alternative materials. Over the years, the development of PV technology has undergone numerous changes, which has led to cells being classified into different generations, originally defined for inorganic materials as high cost/high efficiency (1st generation), low cost/low efficiency (2nd generation) and low cost/high efficiency (3rd generation).

The U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) maintains a plot of compiled values of the highest confirmed conversion efficiencies for research cells for a range of photovoltaic technologies from 1976 to the present, as shown in . This chart highlights cell efficiency results within different families of semiconductors: (1) multijunction cells, (2) single-junction gallium arsenide cells, (3) crystalline silicon cells, (4) thin film technologies, and (5) emerging photovoltaics. The graph sums up the historic quest of the solar industry to improve the conversion efficiencies in all PV technologies.

Efficiencies of the best researched solar cell technologies. (Source: NREL, 2017.)

The Light Management in New Photovoltaic Materials (LMPV) program within the Atomic and Molecular Physics (AMOLF) Institute, Amsterdam, Netherlands provides an up-to-date comparison between single junction world-record efficiencies for different materials and the fundamental Shockley-Queisser detailed-balance efficiency limit. (HYPERLINK http://lmpv.amolf.nl/SQlmpv.amolf.nl/SQ). This figure is included on the front cover of this book. (Source: Photovoltaic materials present efficiencies and future challenges, A. Polman, M. Knight, E.G. Garnett, B. Ehrler, and W.C. Sinke, Science 352, 307 (2016). DOI: HYPERLINK http://science.sciencemag.org/content/352/6283/aad442410.1126/science.aad4424.

Emerging PV technologies, commonly referred to as the 4th generation, involve the use of non-conventional materials for photovoltaic devices, opening the possibility of tailoring material properties to create large-area, inexpensive, and efficient photoconversion devices. These include reducing the cost of monocrystalline silicon substrate, reducing the thickness of existing crystalline silicon, cultivating multi-junction and multi-gap approaches and exploring new materials/mechanisms like perovskites/ferroelectricity. In addition, efforts towards combining polymer thin films with the stability of novel inorganic nanostructures with the aim of improving the optoelectronic properties are being aggressively pursued.

This book,