Experimental Determination of Power Losses and Heat Generation in Solar Cells for Photovoltaic-Thermal Applications

Solar cell thermal recovery has recently attracted more and more attention as a viable solution to increase photovoltaic efficiency. However, the convenience of the implementation of such a strategy is bound to the precise evaluation of the recoverable thermal power and to a proper definition of the losses occurring within the solar device. In this work, we establish a framework in which all solar cell losses are defined and described. The aim is to determine the components of the thermal fraction. We therefore describe an experimental method to precisely compute these components from the measurement of the external quantum efficiency, the current–voltage characteristics, and the reflectivity of the solar cell. Applying this method to three different types of devices (bulk, thin film, and multi-junction), we could exploit the relationships among losses for the main three generations of PV cells available nowadays. In addition, since the model is explicitly wavelength dependent, we could show how thermal losses in all cells occur over the whole solar spectrum, and not only in the infrared region. This demonstrates that profitable thermal harvesting technologies should enable heat recovery over the whole solar spectral range.