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Solar panels with a bi-facial design provide energy from both sides; thus, it would be interesting to examine the viability of such modules in an extremely hot and dry city like Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India. This study assesses the temperature, efficiency, and bifacial gain of PV bifacial modules as a function of solar irradiation, ambient temperature, wind speed, and additional parameters. The global horizontal irradiance has been used in this study to calculate Direct Normal Irradiance (DNI), Diffuse Horizontal Irradiance (DHI) and Front and Rear Irradiance. The results show that an optimal tilt angle of 43.5° provides the best efficiency of 24% at ambient temperature. For a constant value of tilt angle, the bi-facial gain of the module increases linearly with albedo factor. It has also been discovered that continuing to raise the elevation beyond 1 meter will eventually diminish the bifacial gain because the reflected and diffuse irradiance will become less intense on the rear side of the bifacial module.

In this article detailed electro-analytical comparison of the commercial mono-crystalline silicon and passivated emitter and rear contact (PERC) solar cells has been presented that can help in device optimization during manufacturing process. This study indicates fundamental differences between these two technologies in terms of the series resistance, shunt resistance and junction quality including ideality factor and doping concentration. Impedance spectroscopic analysis revealed a value of series resistance of 1 Ω for both the devices with no substantial difference, which suggest that employed metal contacts and base layer conductivity in both the solar cells have comparable electrical characteristics. The shunt resistance of 190 Ω cm2 and 98 Ω cm2 have been obtained for PERC and reference solar cells. The ideality factors of 1.9 and 2.2 have been obtained for PERC and reference solar cells, which indicate a better junction quality in PERC solar cells. From Mott-Schottky analysis a value of 0.65 V built-in potential has been obtained for both the solar cells. A doping density of 2.31 × 1016 cm−3 and 4.494 × 1016 cm−3 has been obtained for reference and PERC solar cells. This study intends to provide a basis for development of better optimization strategies to improve the performance of solar cells.

Despite advanced research on device structures and processing conditions of perovskite-based solar cell, many performance aspects are still less understood. The situation becomes more complex in the case of hole transport free (HTM), open-air synthesized solar cell which has an immense potential for low cost and easy fabrication processes. In this work, a correlation between performance deciding parameters with transport and recombination mechanism for the HTM free open-air synthesized perovskite solar cells are studied. The current-voltage response of the fabricated solar cells is not only limited by the phenomenon of transport and recombination but also the injection efficiency of charge carriers. In comparison with the efficient HTM perovskite solar cells, the domination of space charge limited current inside the perovskite layer in HTM free solar cell limits the performance of the device. The interfacial energetic of the active junction i.e. TiO2/perovskite was studied using capacitive analysis that depicts the charge distribution and kinetics in a solar cell. Indeed, the present work illustrates the way to identify the performance limiting parameters in HTM free perovskite solar cell to improve the performance of future devices.

Polyaniline (Pani) thin films doped with camphor sulfonic acid (CSA) have been deposited on glass substrates using the spin coating technique. Pani is chemically synthesized by an oxidation method at ∼0 °C. Pani-CSA films show a hexagonal structure in scanning electron micrographs, which occurs due to the crystalline growth of CSA. A dense hexagonal structure is visible for film deposited at 800 rpm, but it becomes sparser as the revolutions per minute are increased (1200, 1500 and 2000 rpm). Electronic transition of quinoid units cause an absorption shoulder at ∼900 nm for films deposited at 1200, 1500 and 2000 rpm, which is not observed for film deposited at 800 rpm.