Abstract
Expenses associated with shipping, installation, land, regulatory compliance and on-going maintenance and operations of utility-scale photovoltaics can be significantly reduced by increasing the power conversion efficiency of solar modules1 through improved materials, device designs and strategies for light management2,3,4. Single-junction cells have performance constraints defined by their Shockley–Queisser limits5. Multi-junction cells6,7,8,9,10,11,12 can achieve higher efficiencies, but epitaxial and current matching requirements between the single junctions in the devices hinder progress. Mechanical stacking of independent multi-junction cells13,14,15,16,17,18,19 circumvents these disadvantages. Here we present a fabrication approach for the realization of mechanically assembled multi-junction cells using materials and techniques compatible with large-scale manufacturing. The strategy involves printing-based stacking of microscale solar cells, sol–gel processes for interlayers with advanced optical, electrical and thermal properties, together with unusual packaging techniques, electrical matching networks, and compact ultrahigh-concentration optics. We demonstrate quadruple-junction, four-terminal solar cells with measured efficiencies of 43.9% at concentrations exceeding 1,000 suns, and modules with efficiencies of 36.5%.
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Acknowledgements
This work is supported by the DOE ‘Light-Material Interactions in Energy Conversion’ Energy Frontier Research Center under grant DE-SC0001293. L.S. acknowledges support from China Scholarship Council. We thank J. Hu and Y. Zou for discussion on chalcogenide glasses, J. Soares for help on laser facilities, J. He for ray tracing modelling, and E. Chow for thermal imaging.
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X.S., C.A.B., S.B., M.M., H.Y., L.S., A.R.B., C.J.C. and J.A.R. designed and fabricated the devices. X.S., C.A.B., J.W.W., B.F., L.S., A.R.B. and C.J.C. measured the data. X.S., B.F., M.M. and S.W. performed simulations. R.G.N., S.B. and J.A.R. provided guidance. X.S., C.A.B., M.M. and J.A.R. wrote the paper.
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The authors declare that C.A.B., S.B., J.W.W., B.F., M.M., H.Y., S.B. and J.A.R. (affiliated with Semprius and Solar Junction) are involved in commercializing various technologies related to those described here. J.A.R. is a co-founder of Semprius.
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Sheng, X., Bower, C., Bonafede, S. et al. Printing-based assembly of quadruple-junction four-terminal microscale solar cells and their use in high-efficiency modules. Nature Mater 13, 593–598 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat3946
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat3946
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