Improving the Performance of Solar Cells Under Non-Perpendicular Incidence by Photonic Crystal

Photonic crystal has been proved to manipulate light effectively and improve the performance of solar cells. In this paper, high-performance GaAs-based solar cells with photonic crystal were fabricated to decrease the dependence on the angle of incident light. Photoluminescence (PL) intensity of solar cells with photonic crystal reduced only 8% when the incident angle changed from 10° to 30°, while the PL intensity of the ordinary solar cells decreased 39% under the same condition. It manifests the photonic crystal can manipulate the incident light in turn reduce the dependence of incident light angle. Besides, the short circuit current of solar cells was increased by 32% after the photonic crystal was added. When the incident angle of light increased to 30° from 0°, the short circuit current of ordinary solar cell decreased 29.5%, while that of solar cell with photonic crystals reduced 12%. Correspondingly, the photoelectric conversion efficiency (PCE) of ordinary solar cells was reduced 31.2%. In contrast, solar cells with photonic crystal decreased only 11.5%. The enhancement factor of the PCE of solar cells with photonic crystal to that of ordinary solar cells increases from 1.26 to 1.6 as the incident angle rises to 30°from 0°. In summary, solar cells with photonic crystal are less sensitive to the incident angle and could absorb more light without angle limits, then increase the PCE. These solar cells with photonic crystals are promising in low-cost and high power conversion efficiency solar cell fields.