Heliotactic Press

Let’s talk about light interacting with a semiconductor to yield electricity. Today’s topic is to distinguish between low levels of irradiance and high levels of irradiance. Effectively, we are asking for an estimate of the concentration of photons being delivered from a high energy source to a low energy absorber/collector.

When we say low levels of irradiance, we are estimating a scale of light concentration that is typical of the diffuse and direct component of unconcentrated “global” or “total” solar radiation, or the light from a standard incandescent lamp or fluorescent lamp. This could be anywhere <1000 mW/cm², or 10x the sun’s concentration (remember, this is just a crude scale, not a hard and fast rule–don’t take this back to your classes). The standard for testing solar cells inside the earth’s atmosphere is called Air Mass 1.5 Global (AM 1.5G), because the light from the sun passes through 1.5 lengths of a generic Earth’s atmosphere to generate a convenient irradiance of ~ 100 mW/cm². Low levels of light such as this provide a sufficient number of photons (packets of light) to excite the electrons into an unoccupied level of energy (the conduction band). However, the population distribution of the majority carriers does not change significantly. That’s okay: the key player in a photovoltaic absorber is the minority carrier (n-type semiconductor: a hole; p-type semiconductor: an electron), and the population of minority carriers does change significantly with light absorption. Minority carrier transport gets the job done, in fact, because they are the limiting rate in the absorber reactor. You can find out more about charge carriers and carrier transport in the Photovoltaics CDROM from Honsberg and Bowden, Chapter 3 (although it doesn’t work completely for Macs, sadly)

What is high irradiance? You’ve heard the warnings about strong lasers pointing into others’ eyes? A laser is a coherent, collimated light source (the photons’ waves are in phase and heading the same direction), such that the photons can be very concentrated. If sufficient numbers of photons are absorbed by a semiconductor, the population of photoexcited charge carriers can be much greater than the majority carriers, and there a population inversion occurs, leading to stimulated emission (Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation).

The photons from light bulbs and suns are neither coherent nor collimated, although they can be concentrated significantly to potentially cause a population inversion and stimulated emission (yes, there is the possibility for a solar laser). However, before that stage there are other phenomena that occur, making it a bit more complicated.

Concentrating cells allow an increased flux of photons to the smaller receiver/absorber using a larger aperture to collect the solar light. The geometric concentration ratio is the ratio of the area of an aperture to that of the absorber (C=A_apt/A_abs).^1,2 For a perfect concentrator (as a point on the surface of Earth), the radiation from the Sun on the aperture-receiver assembly is only a fraction of the total radiation emitted by the Sun, given a half-angle subtended by the Sun of 0.27°. Assuming a blackbody, the absorber would have a maximum theoretical concentration ratio of 45,000 (for a circular concentrator) or 212 (for a linear,trough concentrator).¹ The higher the concentration,the higher the photon flux (including increasing temperature),and the more precise the optics of the collector must be to deliver. This is an extreme energy flux for any semiconductor. Under high illumination levels, one will observe a decrease in minority carrier lifetimes and related diffusion path lengths. However, 45.6% of the suns power is contained in the infrared band (the part that makes things “hot”). Thermally, an imaging concentrator (C>> 10; analogous to camera lenses) can produce temperatures from 500 to 1500 °C at the absorber.² This increased temperature can be used to drive thermal work (steam generation) or thermophotoelectrochemical reactions for concentrating solar power (CSP, not to be confused with CPV), but is not necessarily good for photovoltaic performance. High temperatures tend to decrease the efficiency of a photovoltaic device. In particular, this is why members of the microelectronics industry are getting into the concentrating photovoltaics field (CPV)–they know how to cool superhot microelectronics, and will do the same with CPV devices.

It is so interesting to see how this is all a great spread of possibilities that one can derive from our nearest fusion reactor!

Text sources:
1. Rabl, A. Active Solar Collectors and Their Applications. 1985 Oxford University Press, New York

2. Duffie, J. A.; Beckman, W. A. Solar Engineering of Thermal Processes. (3rd Ed.) 2006 John Wiley & Sons Inc, Hoboken, NJ, USA.

3. Andreev, V. M.; Grilikhes, V. A.; Rumyantsev, V. D. Photovoltaic Conversion of Concentrated Sunlight. 1997, John Wiley & Sons Ltd, Chichester, England.