Investigation of temperature effect on the performance of nanostructured silicon thin-film solar cells

Temperature is a critical factor in affecting the performance of solar cells. In this paper, photoelectric coupling model has been carried out to investigate how temperature affects the performance of thin-film solar cells with 2D nanohole photonic crystal structures. Both the temperature dependence of optical and electrical characteristics is studied. It is found that the increase of temperature is positive for optical properties whereas that is negative for electrical properties. The slight increase of optical properties can not compensate the dramatic decrease of electrical properties in nanostructured thin-film solar cells with the increase of temperature. Therefore, the power conversion efficiency decreases with increasing temperature. In addition, the effect of thermal expansion coefficient is investigated as well and the results indicate that this effect can be neglected.