A Comparison of Spectrum-Splitting Configurations for High-Efficiency Photovoltaic Systems With Perovskite Cells

The recent development of inexpensive perovskite photovoltaic (PV) cells at a variety of band gap energies has opened the prospects for commercially viable spectrum-splitting PV systems. A variety of cell configurations exist for implementing spectrum splitting in PV modules. In this article, 3-junction and 4-junction hybrid spectrum-splitting systems are proposed that use volume holographic lens arrays for lateral spectral separation and absorptive filtering in semitransparent perovskite PV cells for vertical spectral separation. A 3-junction hybrid system is shown to have greater conversion efficiency (28.7%) than comparable systems using completely lateral (25.6%) or completely stacked (26.9%) cell arrangements. It is shown that a 4-junction hybrid system has a hypothetical conversion efficiency of 30.0% using perovskite PV cells that have been experimentally demonstrated in the literature with energy band gaps of 1.25 eV, 1.55 eV, 1.72 eV, and 2.30 eV.