Gerhard Peharz

Improving the effectiveness of photovoltaic devices by light guiding optical foils

A photovoltaic device comprising of areas which are partly covered by solar cells and a light guiding film is investigated. In particular results on the feasibility of combined daylighting and photovoltaic energy generation are presented. Optical simulations have been conducted for a device-design optimized to redirect most of perpendicular impinging light rays onto photovoltaic areas. Two application cases are investigated for integrating the photovoltaic device into windows and/or glazings in middle (northern) latitudes. The first application case deals with an overhead glazing and the second deals with a window integrated in a roof tilted by 30° towards south. For the latter case encouraging results have been derived. In particular it is calculated that during summer time more than 70% of the direct sunlight is absorbed by photovoltaic areas and less than 10% is transmitted. Consequently, effective shading in summer against direct sunlight can be achieved and most of the shaded solar irradiation can be used for photovoltaic energy conversion. In contrast, in winter time about 40% of the direct sunlight is transmitted through the device and enables decent daylighting.

TUNING THE COLORS OF C-SI SOLAR CELLS BY EXPLOITING PLASMONIC EFFECTS

The color of a crystalline silicon (c-Si) solar cell is mainly determined by its anti-reflective coating. This is a lambda/4 coating made from a transparent dielectric material. The thickness of the anti-reflective coating is optimized for maximal photocurrent generation, resulting in the typical blue or black colors of c-Si solar cells. However, for building-integrated photovoltaic (BiPV) applications the color of the solar cells is demanded to be tunable – ideally by a cheap and flexible coating process on standard (low cost) c-Si solar cells. Such a coating can be realized by applying plasmonic coloring which is a rapidly growing technology for high-quality color filtering and rendering for different fields of application (displays, imaging,…). In this contribution, we present results of an approach for tuning the color of standard industrial c-Si solar cells that is based on coating them with metallic nano-particles. In particular, thin films (< 20 nm) of a metal (e.g., silver) were sputtered onto c-Si solar cells and thermally annealed subsequently. The sizes and the shapes of the nano-particles (characterized by SEM) were found to depend on the thickness of the deposited films and the surface roughness of the substrates/solar cells. With such an approach it is possible to tune the color of the standard c-Si cells from blue to green and brownish/red. The position of the resonance peak in the reflection spectrum was found to be almost independent from the angle of incidence. This low angular sensitivity is a clear advantage compared to alternative color tuning methods, for which additional dielectric thin films are deposited on c-Si solar cells.

Laser-assisted manufacturing of micro-optical volume elements for enhancing the amount of light absorbed by solar cells in photovoltaic modules

The laser-generation of micro-optical volume elements is a promising approach to decrease the optical shadowing of front side metal contacts of solar cells. Focusing a femtosecond laser beam into the volume of the encapsulation material causes a local modification its optical constants. Suchlike fabricated micro-optical elements can be used to decrease the optical shadowing of the front side metallization of c-Si solar cells. Test samples comprising of a sandwich structure of a glass sheet with metallic grid-lines, an Ethylene-vinyl acetate (EVA) encapsulant and another glass sheet were manufactured in order to investigate the optical performance of the volume optics. Transmission measurements show that the shadowing of the metalling grid-lines is substantially decreased by the micro-optical volume elements created in the EVA bulk right above the grid-fingers. A detailed investigation of the optical properties of these volume elements was performed: (i) experimentally on the basis of goniometric measurements, as well as (ii) theoretically by applying optical modelling and optimization procedures. This resulted in a better understanding of the effectiveness of the optical volume elements in decreasing the optical shadowing of metal grid lines on the active cell surfaces. Moreover, results of photovoltaic mini-modules with incorporated micro-optical volume elements are presented. Results of optical simulation and Laser Beam Induced Current (LBIC) experiments show that the losses due to the grid fingers can be reduced by about 50%, when using this fs-laser structuring approach for the fabrication of micro-optical volume elements in the EVA material.

Combining ray-tracing and FDTD to enable the simulation of complex optical devices in an iterative simulation process with reduced simulation effort

The development of photonic multi-scale devices with tailor-made optical properties requires the control and the manipulation of light propagation within structures of different length scales, ranging from sub-wavelength to macroscopic dimensions. Unfortunately, applications of common optical simulation methods are usually restricted to particular size regimes. For this reason, a complete optical simulation of multi-scale devices can only be conducted by combining different simulation methods. In our previous work we already introduced an interface method that uses the Poynting vector to bridge between classical Ray-Tracing and the Finite-Difference-Time-Domain method to enable the simulation of suchlike devices. In this contribution we present and discuss a method to reduce the simulation effort and time consumption of this interface simulation process. This approach is based on an FDTD simulation concept for creating the matrices containing probability density distributions that are needed for the FDTD-RT interface simulations by using broadband frequency sources. With this new FDTD simulation concept, the number of simulations needed to create these matrices can be significantly decreased.