Thick and Thin Film Solar Cells: New Formulation

Solar cells rely on photogeneration of charge carriers in p-n junctions and their transport and subsequent recombination in the quasineutral regions. Several basic issues concerning the physics of the operation of solar cells remain obscure. This paper discusses some of those unsolved basic problems. In conventional solar cells, recombination of photogenerated charge carriers plays a major limiting role in the cell efficiency. High quality thin-film solar cells may overcome this limit if the minority diffusion lengths become large as compared to the cell dimensions, but, strikingly, the conventional model fails to describe the cell electric behavior under these conditions. A new formulation of the basic equations describing charge carrier transport in the cell along with a set of boundary conditions is presented. An analytical closed-form solution is obtained under the linear approximation. It is shown that the calculation of the open-circuit voltage of the solar cell diode does not lead to unphysical results in the new given framework.