Opportunities and limitation of Rainbow solar cells
Mariano Campoy Quiles a
a Instituto de Ciencia de Materiales de Barcelona (ICMAB-CSIC), Campus UAB, 08193 Bellaterra, Barcelona, Spain
Proceedings of International Conference on Hybrid and Organic Photovoltaics (HOPV25)
Roma, Italy, 2025 May 12th - 14th
Organizers: Filippo De Angelis, Francesca Brunetti and Claudia Barolo
Invited Speaker Session, Mariano Campoy Quiles, presentation 070
Publication date: 17th February 2025

Single-junction organic photovoltaics (OPVs) nowadays have reached promising power conversion efficiencies, around 20%. Besides new materials, going beyond the current efficiencies could, in principle, be achieved by multi-junction devices, which promise a reduction in thermalization and absorption losses [1]. In this talk, we will present a multi-junction in-plane spectral splitting geometry that we call Rainbow solar cells and that aims at overcoming the limitations of stacked solution processed devices [2]. In the Rainbow geometry, a series of sub-cells are placed next to each other laterally, and illuminated through an optical component that splits the incoming white beam into its spectral components, thus matching local spectrum and absorption for each sub-cell. The fabricated n-terminal devices are capable of extracting the maximum power of each sub-cell without the need for current matching nor processing challenges. We demonstrate the concept for a high and low band-gap sub-cells, obtaining an efficiency increase of around 30% of the Rainbow geometry with respect to our best single junction device [2]. Then, we use high throughput methods based on gradients on the parameters of interest and blade coating [3-5] to screen tens of materials exhibiting either wide band gap [4] or narrow bandgap [5], and thus push the efficiency of the Rainbow multi-junction further up. Combining experiments and simulations we provide material design rules for this type of device both, for binary and ternary based sub-cells. Finally, the major limitations will be discussed.

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