Lighting flicker: a blind spot in indoor photovoltaic cell characterization

摘要： Pulse width modulation (PWM) driving is common in emerging solid-state or LED lighting. Unlike conventional lighting devices, the peak illumination intensity of a PWM-driven LED can be a hundredfold of average illumination intensity, causing strong lighting flicker. This work addresses the impact of the flicker on indoor amorphous Si (a-Si) photovoltaic cell performance. The power conversion efficiency of an amorphous silicon photovoltaic cell is found to be a function of not the average, but the peak illumination intensity. Indoor photovoltaic cells can thus seriously underperform under PWM-driven solid-state lighting when the peak illumination intensity is high enough to decrement photovoltaic cell performance.