Electrical equivalent model of intermediate band solar cell using PSpice

Abstract

Intermediate band solar cells (IBSCS) is a relatively new solar cell concept. The theoretical conversion efficiency limit for IBSCS is predicted to be 63.2% with blackbody illumination and 65.1% with AM1.5 spectrum, comparable to the theoretical efficiency for optimized triple junction solar cells with efficiencies of 63.8% and 67.0% under blackbody and AM1.5 illumination, respectively. This paper presents a structure of IBSC based on ZnTe:O. The proposed model uses irradiance and temperature as input parameters and the output characteristics of the structure are used as a prototypical example. So, in this work the artificial neural networks (ANNs) and the analog behavior modeling (ABM) of PSpice are implemented in order to model the IBSC. In addition, we have used the bias matrix and the weights matrix obtained by training to establish the IBSCS model on PSPICE simulator. This method represents an advantage by using a small representative database. Therefore, the obtained results of our model can be used in an electrical simulator. Thus, this method can be extended to other solar cells for motivating experimental efforts to realize these promising photovoltaic devices for low cost and high efficiency.