Document Type

Article

Rights

Available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike 4.0 International Licence

Disciplines

Civil engineering, Construction engineering, Municipal and structural engineering, Environmental and geological engineering

Publication Details

Materials Science Forum

Abstract

The main energy losses in solar cells are related to spectral losses where high energy photons are not used efficiently, and energy is lost via thermalization which reduces the solar cell’s overall efficiency. A way to tackle this is to introduce a luminescent down-shifting layer (LDS) to convert these high energy photons into a lower energy bracket helping the solar cell to absorb them and thus generating a greater power output. In this paper, lumogen dye Violet 570 has been used as LDS coated films of 10μm and 60μm placed on top of Si solar cells. The dye was incorporated into polymer films of Polyvinyl Butyral (PVB) and Polymethyl Methacrylate (PMMA) after which they were tested for their absorption, transmission and emission properties. Once optimised layers had been determined, they were deposited directly onto silicon solar cells and the external quantum efficiency (EQE) of the Si solar cells were measured with and without the LDS layers. The resulting graphs have shown an increase of up to 2.9% in the overall EQE efficiency after the lumogen films had been applied.

DOI

http://dx.doi.org/10.4028/www.scientific.net/MSF.995.71

Funder

European Research Council; Science Foundation Ireland

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