Structural colour application in photonic enhanced Perovskite Solar Cells for BIPV

• Autor(a) principal: Almeida, Eva Jesus Marques
• Data de Publicação: 2023
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10362/163871
• topic: Building integrated photovoltaics; Perovskite solar cell; Light trapping; Structural colour; FDTD optimization; Domínio/Área Científica::Engenharia e Tecnologia::Nanotecnologia

The current unsustainable energy consumption of society has increased the demand for clean and virtually unlimited energy sources, such as solar energy. In the market of solar electricity, building integrated photovoltaics (BIPV) has been receiving considerable attention. For this application, the compatibility of photovoltaic modules with construction materials requires the development of flexible, low-weight, thin-film solar cells. MAPbI3 solar cells (1.55 eV bandgap) with light trapping (LT) structures were chosen for this study, as these have excelled at maintaining high optical performance, despite low cell thickness. A particularity of the BIPV industry is that, unlike most photovoltaic studies, the aesthetics related to the colours of the building material are valued. Thus, this work developed a computational method that designs solar cells with LT features capable of increasing both the optical performance and the solar cell affinity to a specific colour. The focus was then to study how the geometrical features of solar cells and respective LTs affect the colour and optical properties, as well as their layout optimization and angular sensitivity. Here we specifically addressed magenta and green chromaticity since these cover the reflection peaks of the primary colours in the RGB system, and are generally some of the hardest colorations to obtain for high-performance solar cells. A variety of LTs were designed, simulated and optimized, from simple gratings to complex semi-spheroids. The maximum current density values were obtained for solar cells with top dome structures—22.07mA/cm2 for magenta and 21.40mA/cm2 for green — reaching an increase of 6.68% and 3.44%, respectively, relative to the reference cell in planar configuration. Regarding angular homogeneity, this work tested incidence angles between 0◦ and 60◦, where, at the highest illumination angle, a maximum current density of SC = 20.85mA/cm2 was obtained, for magenta domes, corresponding to a relative SC loss of 5.53%.