Physics of Energy Conversion () || 10. Photovoltaic energy conversion

摘要： In a photovoltaic device, solar energy is converted into electricity along a path very different from the one taken in a solarthermal power plant. Here, in a first step the energy of the solar photons is converted into chemical energy in a solid state absorber. This means that the absorber is brought into an electronically excited state involving a reconfiguration of its charge carriers by the generation of electron/hole (e?/h+)-pairs, i.e. by the following reaction: Ground state + ?? → e? + h+. Here, ?? represents a photon with sufficient energy to bring an electron to the excited state. The chemical energy of the charge carrier ensembles in the conduction and valence bands is then converted into electrical energy by spatially separating the e?/h+-pairs via electrical contacts of the absorber which are electron or hole selective, respectively. In general such selective contacts can only be realized by a jump in the material properties between the two contacts, an example for this being a pn-junction. Since under illumination electrons and holes have different electrochemical potentials in the absorber material, this separation leads to a voltage drop between the contacts selective for the different charge carrier types. It is thus the selectivity of the contacts that introduces the built-in asymmetry into the solar cell, making it a usable voltage source (see Section 5.2). This basic working principle is true for all types of solar cells, ranging from conventional solar cells built from crystalline silicon (c-Si) over thin film solar cells fabricated from different materials such as, e.g. Cu(In,Ga)Se2 (CIGS) to organic or dye sensitized solar cells, and is schematically shown in Figure 10.1.