Fundamentals of Solar Photovoltaic Device Design and Development

The book discusses the development and performance analysis of Multi-junction and Multiple Quantum Well Solar Cells including works on Graphene based solar technology. A high-efficiency solar cell is potentially developed by having several Indium Gallium Nitride junctions or quantum wells. With the increase in the numbers of QW periods to 20 periods, the photovoltaic parameters especially conversion efficiency increases significantly. Under space AM0 solar illumination, the cell efficiency increases up to 8.2 % with InGaN / GaN structure. This clearly demonstrates that InGaN with GaN top cell and bottom cell can definitely provide broader and higher quantum efficiency. The graphene/GaAs device using the solar spectrum of AM1.5 with the solar radiation of 1000W/m2 is developed. The 400 nm thick graphene layered solar cell outperformed existing devices with enrichment in fill factor and in power conversion efficiency, consequently, demonstrating the device to be the future for the green energy domain. The book therefore showed that it is possible to model important effects such as quantum tunnelling, Schottky junction, or grapheme as new material in photovoltaic solar cell.