On the alignment tolerance of photovoltaic laser power converters

This work addresses the alignment of a light spot onto photovoltaic laser power converters for power-by-light applications. A model to compare the alignment tolerances of different cell designs by means of the maximum acceptable misalignment is introduced. Monolithic interconnected multi-segment cells, which are commonly used as high-voltage devices, suffer from poor current matching for misaligned light spots. We show that the maximum acceptable misalignment of circular pie-shaped high-voltage devices decreases quickly with increasing number of series connected segments. A lower limit for the precision of the alignment procedure is only 5.1% of the cell radius. This precision requirement is three times higher than for single-segment cells (15.7%). (C) 2016 Elsevier GmbH. All rights reserved.