Mitigating Solar Cell Degradation
Overview
Heterojunction (HJ) Si solar cells have world record efficiencies approaching 27%. However, these Si HJ solar cells have not yet been widely adopted by the market because they exhibit a performance degradation of about 1%/year, twice as high as standard cSi cells. Our group is adapting the knowledge developed via studying glassy systems to understand the leading degradation processes, with the aim of mitigating them.
How
LAMMPS molecular dynamics, Quantum Espresso DFT, Nudged Elastic Band method.
Talks
- 2023 From Femtoseconds to Gigaseconds: The SolDeg Project to Analyze Heterojunction and TOPCon Cell Degradation with Machine Learning, Talk at EPFL, Neuchatel, Switzerland
- 2022 From Femtoseconds to Gigaseconds: The SolDeg Project to Analyze Si Heterojunction Cell Degradation with Machine Learning, PVSC 2022, Philadelphia
- 2022 From Femtoseconds to Gigaseconds: The SolDeg Project to Analyze Si Heterojunction Cell Degradation with Machine Learning, Silicon PV conference 2022, Koblenz, Germany
- 2018 A Deliberate Journey, Harvard – Part I and Part II
Papers
- 2025. A. Goga, Z. Zhao, A. Diggs, Z. Crawford, G. T. Zimányi. The Fermi-Level Dependence of Hydrogen Dynamics and Its Effects on Degradation of Silicon Heterojunction Solar Cells 2025 IEEE 53rd Photovoltaic Specialists Conference (PVSC) Pages 1246-1248
- 2025. A. Diggs, Z. Zhao, A. Goga, Z. Crawford, G. T. Zimanyi. Fermi Level and Light Driven Defect Generation in Silicon Solar Cells arXiv preprint arXiv:2501.06667
- 2024. Z. Zhao, A. Diggs, Z. Crawford, A. Goga, G. T. Zimanyi. Light Induced Degradation in Silicon Heterojunction Solar Cells 2024 IEEE 52nd Photovoltaic Specialist Conference (PVSC), Seattle, WA, USA, 2024, pp. 1090-1092
- 2024. A. Diggs, Z. Crawford, A. Goga, Z. Zhao, J. Stuckelberger, G. T. Zimányi. Pinhole Formation by Nucleation-Driven Phase Separation in TOPCon and POLO Solar Cells: Structural Dynamics and Optimization ACS Applied Energy Materials 2024, 7, 8, 3414–3423
- 2023. A. Diggs, A Goga, Z. Crawford; G. T. Zimanyi TOPCon Solar Cell Degradation via Pinhole Nucleation 2023 IEEE 50th Photovoltaic Specialists Conference (PVSC), San Juan, PR, USA, 2023, pp. 1-3, doi: 10.1109/PVSC48320.2023.10359586
