Energy yield analysis of textured perovskite silicon tandem solar cells and modules

Perovskite silicon tandem solar cells combine potentially low production costs with the ability to surpass the efficiency limit of silicon single junction solar cells. Optical modeling and optimization are crucial to achieve this ambitious goal in the near future. The optimization should seek to maximize the energy yield based on realistic environmental conditions. This work analyzes the energy yield of perovskite silicon tandem solar cells and modules based on realistic experimental data, with a special focus on the investigation of surface textures at the front and rear side of the solar cell and its implication for reflection as well as parasitic absorption properties. The investigation reveals a 7.3%rel higher energy yield for an encapsulated tandem cell with a textured front side compared with an encapsulated high efficiency single junction solar cell with 24.3% harvesting efficiency for irradiance data of the year 2014 in Freiburg/Germany. © 2019 Optical Society of America under the terms of the OSA Open Access Publishing Agreement


Introduction
Based on the rapid development of hybrid organic-inorganic perovskites as solar cell absorber materials, perovskite silicon tandem solar cells have quickly reached the efficiency level of silicon single junction devices. The current record value of 28.0% for a two-terminal device [1] even overcame the silicon record of 26.7% [2]. Due to the much higher theoretical efficiency potential of tandem solar cells, significant further improvements are possible.
As perovskite silicon tandem solar cells are still in an early stage of development, a large variety of device configurations have been investigated over the last years. For a comparison of their performance the STC efficiency can be of limited value, because two-terminal tandem devices with the need for current-matching are more susceptible to environmental conditions that can vary strongly over the year or between different locations. The energy yield takes into account parameters like varying spectra, different angles of incidence or temperature. It is therefore a much more comprehensive figure of merit than the STC efficiency. Note that three-or four-terminal tandem devices might simplify the restrictions due to environmental conditions but increase complexity in the module fabrication process.
Purely theoretical analyses, e.g. based on the Shockley-Queisser-limit are helpful to understand the fundamental behavior and estimate the influence of environmental changes [3]. However, in order to derive specific recommendations for fabrication, realistic device configurations have to be investigated. For this task, optical and electrical device simulations are highly valuable.
The focus topics of most studies are the (i) module configuration, e.g. two-terminal vs. four-terminal, (ii) the material choice or (iii) the layer order and thicknesses in the perovskite top cell stack. Often a planar layer stack is optimized as top cell with regard to material properties and layer thicknesses, sometimes leading to predicted cell efficiencies above 30% Among the parameters, which are less often included in simulation studies are (iv) the integration of surface textures, (v) effects of the module encapsulation and (vi) a calculation of the energy yield including realistic environmental conditions as well as electrical properties.
An extensive study by Hörantner et al. optimized the layer thickness of planar perovskite silicon tandem devices considering the electrical properties of the device as well as measured irradiance data for different locations [4]. However, neither surface textures nor a module encapsulation were taken into account in this study. Jost et al. focus in their yield analysis on textured interfaces but take the full module stack with encapsulation only for some of the systems into account [8]. Jiang et al. investigate various tandem module configurations and point out the importance of the module encapsulation. However, no surface textures are included [9]. Van Eerden et al. investigate materials and include also surface roughness in a tandem device [10], but without calculating the energy yield.
Summarizing the available literature, a broad range of module configurations, material choices and layer stacks have been investigated. In some cases, surface textures, module encapsulation or an energy yield calculation were included. The only study available so far combining all aspects (i)-(vi) was performed by Lehr et al. [11].
In this work, we investigate the energy yield perovskite silicon two-terminal tandem modules, focusing on an optimization of the layer thickness, the introduction of surface textures and the calculation of the energy yield. In contrast to the work by Lehr et al. [11] an n-i-p configuration is investigated, with the electron contact layer deposited first on the silicon solar cell and the hole contact last on the sun-facing side. With this deposition sequence, the record efficiencies for single-junction perovskite solar cells have been achieved [12] and it is therefore an attractive system for further investigation. As we will see in the following, additional optical losses might occur in a tandem configuration. Therefore, further optimization is required, for which this paper presents a set of useful tools.
In sections 2 and 3 an overview of the investigated systems and an introduction to the simulation procedure in this work is given. Section 4 shows the simulation results and its implications for future development of perovskite silicon tandem modules.

Material choice and system configuration
The systems that are investigated within this work include realistic monolithic perovskite silicon tandem solar cells with textured front or rear side, a 250 µm thick silicon bulk and a silver rear reflector, without and with module encapsulation (see Fig. 1). The question whether systems with planar front side can perform similarly well as systems with textured front is highly relevant for further research as this can make a large difference for the applied deposition techniques.
The perovskite solar cell consists of a layer stack with indium tin oxide (ITO) [13] as charge transport material at the bottom and top, TiO 2 [14] and C60 [15] as electron contact materials, the perovskite absorber and Spiro-OMeTAD [16] as hole contact layer. The refractive index data of the perovskite absorber layer for different band gaps was adopted from [4]. The data for the silicon bulk was taken from [17] and for the silver reflector from [18]. The solar cells without encapsulation feature a magnesium fluoride (MgF 2 ) [19] top layer as anti-reflective coating (ARC). The module stack includes a 500 µm thick encapsulation made of ethyl vinyl acetate (EVA) using data from [20]. The module front features a planar ARC with a wavelength-independent refractive index of 1.27 and a thickness of 130 nm. Furthermore, a standard silicon solar cell with textured front and planar rear side and 70 nm thick silicon nitride ARC [21] is used as reference.

Summary
The yield an following mo the specific pa and subsequently retrieved the real part of the refractive index n using the Kramers-Kronig-relation [4]. The optimization of the layer thicknesses of the perovskite cell was performed as described in section 3 for bandgaps from 1.55 eV to 1.75 eV and the cell and module stack configurations depicted in section 2. The optimal layer thicknesses of top ITO, Spiro OMeTAD, C60, TiO 2 and bottom ITO converge during the optimization in all cases to their predefined minimum thicknesses of 60 nm, 50 nm, 10 nm, 10 nm and 20 nm respectively, due to the strong influence of their absorptivity. The optimized perovskite layer thicknesses are displayed in Table 1. Note that perovskite thicknesses above 2000 nm seem difficult to fabricate experimentally. Therefore, this value was set as maximum within this work. The ARC in the non-encapsulated case varies between 90 nm and 122 nm.

Optical cell and module performance
The optical cell and module performance was determined using OPTOS simulations based on redistribution matrices for the optimized layer stacks and the silver rear reflector. Within each configuration and using the AM1.5g spectrum [26], similar matched photocurrent densities of the subcells were achieved for the different bandgaps, e.g. ranging from 17.7 mA/cm 2 to 17.8 mA/cm 2 for the module stack with planar front side. The only exception is the bandgap of 1.75 eV since the maximum perovskite layer thickness of 2000 nm is not large enough to reach current matching. In this case the top cell features a photocurrent of 16.7 mA/cm 2 while the bottom cell reaches 18.8 mA/cm 2 , which will reduce the monolithic tandem cell performance. As the voltage increases with larger bandgaps, the bandgap of 1.70 eV is chosen for the following investigation. A detailed optical loss analysis of the module configurations with planar and front side textured solar cells is shown in Fig. 3. This representation of the optical performance of the system reveals two main differences between both systems: Integrating a pyramid texture at the front side of the silicon bottom cell reduces the direct reflection drastically, and the associated losses in photocurrent decrease from 4.8 mA/cm 2 to 0.8 mA/cm 2 . The general effect is known from single junction silicon solar cells. However, the quantification for this realistic perovskite silicon tandem cell stack is a relevant step. Note that direct reflection means light that is reflected before entering the silicon solar cell, while escape reflectance means light that travelled at least once through the silicon solar cell, but then leaves the solar cell through the front surface.
The parasitic absorption in the charge carrier transport layers and transparent electrodes is already high for the planar front side, e.g. being equivalent to a loss in photocurrent of 1.8 mA/cm 2 in the top ITO. It increases even further for the textured front side to a value of 3.0 mA/cm 2 . This interface.
The comb the case with demonstrating The exact values to the tandem cell. T the perovskite Note, that and process p that was not Reducing the improvements

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For the time between Febr s is due to mul bination of all e planar front si g the superiorit 3. Optical loss ana (left) and textu derably. Parasitic a ant effect, even mo absorptance v study perform This is due to t e and a resultin

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The electrical cell. The resp and dark IV- [30], which r Ωcm 2 and R S efficient perov fitted using a 2.418 • 10 −9 sufficient for = 10000 Ωcm as well as n.
icon solar g the light y at STC R P = 5000 ve from a [31] was and J 02 = n = 2 is s were R P n r The J 0 values for a bandgap of 1.7 eV were calculated assuming that the difference between bandgap energy and V oc stays constant for different bandgaps. For the limited bandgap changes within this work this is a good approximation [32]. This consideration leads to J 02 = 6.225 • 10 −10 mA/cm 2 for the perovskite solar cell with a bandgap of 1.7 eV. Note that the series resistance of a solar cell mainly depends on the front and rear interfaces towards the contacts. Since only one of the two metal contacts of each subcell is relevant for a monolithic tandem device, the R s -values of both subcells were divided in half for the energy yield calculation. This procedure leads to STC efficiencies of 25.9% and 27.7% for the modules featuring tandem cells with planar front and textured front, respectively. The single junction module shows an STC efficiency of 25.8%.

Energy yield analysis
All parameters described in the sections above are used as input for YieldOpt 2.0, which performs the energy yield analysis. The direct and diffuse incident spectra are multiplied with the EQE of the respective incidence angle and integrated to the short circuit current at every time step. Note that for the diffuse irradiance, the EQE of 55° incidence is applied [33]. Subsequently, the electrical parameters are used to calculate IV-characteristic, the maximum power point, the efficiency as well as the power output. Note that effects of varying temperature influence both the optical as well as the electrical cell performance but are not taken into account here. We focus on the effect of the texturing, different angles of incidence and different spectral conditions and assume a constant temperature of 25°C. Figure 5(a) shows hourly data of the global irradiance on a module with south orientation and a tilt angle of 29° with respect to the average photon energy (APE). The APE is defined in Eq. (3) and integrated within this work from 300 nm to 1200 nm.
The highest irradiance values appear during the summer months and correspond to average photon energies around 1.8 eV, which is also close to the APE of the AM1.5g spectrum [26]. This agrees well with the highest efficiencies, which are reached for the same APEs, as shown in Fig. 5(b) for the module with the front side textured solar cells. Note that the accuracy of irradiance measurement is relatively large for small irradiance values. For strongly distorted spectra with very low or very high APE, for which the efficiency of the perovskite silicon tandem solar cell drops, coincide with relatively low irradiance, thus the impact on the annual energy yield is low.
As reason for the drop in efficiency towards high and low APEs, an increased current mismatch for distorted spectra is assumed. Therefore, the current mismatch is analyzed in more detail. Figure 6(a) shows the relative current mismatch RCM, defined in Eq. (4), with respect to the global irradiance. RCM can be regarded as the current loss of the tandem device due to the current mismatch,  Figure 6(b different inter tandem solar clearly that ta the output pow   Table 3. yield and produces 7.3% rel more electricity than the module with silicon single junction solar cell (26% compared to 24.3% harvesting efficiency). For comparison, the efficiency under standard testing conditions was 7.8% rel higher. Hence, almost the complete efficiency advantage of the tandem device is translated into a higher energy yield, despite the current matching restriction of the monolithic tandem devices. Note that the fill factor of a tandem cell is low at current matching conditions and higher in mismatched situations. This is a very important effect for yield analyses of tandem solar cells as it reduces the power loss, which would be expected based on the mismatched current only. The performance ratio, which is defined as the ratio between the annual energy yield and the efficiency multiplied by the annual incident energy, expresses the same trend. The module with the single junction silicon solar cells has the highest performance ratio of 94.2%, because it does not suffer from mismatch losses. However, the tandem module with textured front side solar cells features a value of 93.7%, which is very close.
The module with the front side textured tandem solar cells clearly outperforms the module with front side planar tandem solar cells, because of the strong reduction of reflection losses. Furthermore, it can make better use of irradiation at shallow angles, as the slightly larger difference between the harvesting efficiencies compared to the difference of the STC efficiencies shows. The module with planar front side tandem cells even shows a lower energy yield than the module with silicon single junction solar cells, despite its 0.1% higher efficiency under standard testing conditions. Despite the fact that realistic performance ratios in the field will be lower for all module types, as additional factors such as temperature, soiling, placement of the system and also losses in the power electronics will be relevant, this analysis demonstrates that solar modules with persovskite silicon tandem solar cells can outperform solar modules with single-junction high efficiency silicon solar cells. The comparable performance ratios of both module types highlight the energy yield potential of perovskite silicon tandem technology.

Conclusion and outlook
Simulation-based energy yield analyses for perovskite tandem solar cells and modules with textured interfaces can take realistic environmental conditions into account and therefore guide further developments. This work introduces a simulation scheme to calculate the energy yield including complex device configurations with surface structures as well as module encapsulation effects. The investigated perovskite silicon tandem modules with front side texture show a 7.3% rel higher energy yield compared to an encapsulated high efficiency silicon single junction cell for realistic irradiance conditions in Freiburg, Germany. This performance could be enhanced significantly by increasing the tandem efficiency, e.g. via less parasitic absorption in the charge transfer layers, especially the ITO. Furthermore, an optimization of the perovskite layer stack considering the irradiance of the specific location might lead to a reduction of the current mismatch and subsequently to a higher energy yield as well as performance ratio. A parameter that is not investigated within this work is the temperature. It influences the bandgap and thereby both the optical as well as the electrical device performance. Therefore, introducing realistic temperature dependence in a yield analysis will be the subject of future work. Also possible performance difference due to different spectra for direct and diffuse irradiance need to be further investigated.

Funding
The German Research Foundation (DFG) in the project Oposit, the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy (0324037A), Persist and the EU project Sitasol (727497).