Efficiencies of Solar Cells: Present and Future Development

Inhalt:
The energy shortage has been obstruction for economic development, while solar energy is clean, renewable and regarded as a solution. Solar cells have developed for decades and the key factor is their photo-to-electron conversion efficiency. Three generations of solar cells are categorized, which are silicon-based cells, thin film cells and advanced new-type cells concerning perovskite and quantum dot. We review the improvements of silicon-based cells in efficiency, summarizing critical breakthrough in structural design and fabricating techniques that make the efficiency of them close to their theoretical limit recently. Furtherly we give analysis of electronic characterizations of perovskite and quantum dot solar cells, projecting potential options to obtain higher efficiencies in future works. Commercial factors including cost, large-area fabrication are also discussed in this review.