High-efficiency modified tandem solar cell: Simulation of two-absorbers bottom subcell

A novel proposal and simulation of a tandem solar cell with Perovskite/CIGS-GeTe, as a modification of the well-known Perovskite/CIGS tandem cell, is presented in this work. The main idea of using CIGS and GeTe as cascaded absorber layers is to improve the open-circuit voltage. The GeTe has the ability to absorb a wider band of incident spectrum and higher doping level, which leads to the higher voltage. Appending part of GeTe to the CIGS bottom subcell will significantly improve the overall performance based on the open-circuit voltage improvement, where CIGS and GeTe act as a series connection, leading to better performance. In addition, a study of the temperature effects on the proposed tandem cells is introduced. The results have shown that the designed Perovskite/CIGS-GeTe tandem cell has better performance with an efficiency of 33.48%, with a 3% improvement relative to Perovskite/CIGS tandem cell. Moreover, the simulation results show that the Perovskite/CIGS-GeTe tandem cell is more immune to temperature variations than Perovskite/CIGS tandem cell.

Automated summary

A novel proposal and simulation of a tandem solar cell with Perovskite/CIGS-GeTe to improve open-circuit voltage and temperature stability was presented. The addition of GeTe to the CIGS bottom subcell significantly improved overall performance, leading to a 3% efficiency improvement compared to the Perovskite/CIGS tandem cell.