Capitalizing on the existing crystalline silicon industry, double-side textured perovskite-silicon tandem solar cells have a huge potential to penetrate the electricity market. To systematically enhance their performance, a comprehensive understanding of loss mechanisms in the device is needed. Herein, we combine various characterization methods, namely spectrally resolved photoluminescence (PL), transient-PL, PL-based implied open-circuit voltage imaging, spectrometric characterization, and Suns-Voc measurements to quantify current density–voltage (jV) photovoltaic metric losses of a fully-textured perovskite silicon tandem solar cell (26.7% efficiency). The extracted device characteristic parameters are then used as a reference for the comprehensive opto-electrical simulation model (Sentaurus TCAD) which precisely reproduces the experimentally obtained optical and electrical solar cell characteristics. Subsequently, starting from the current device design, we alleviate one step at a time the loss constrains and show the impact of each loss channel on the efficiency, identifying the three major ones to be at the (i) perovskite/C60 interface, (ii) the series resistance, and (iii) parasitic absorption, which limit the Voc, FF, and Jsc of the device, respectively. Furthermore, we demonstrate that a practical efficiency potential of 39.5% can be regarded as practical limit for the presented tandem device architecture. This work emphasizes the importance of loss analysis studies and provides guidelines for future solar cell design optimizations.
PhD Student, University of Freiburg and Fraunhofer ISE