Radiative cooling of solar cells

By Linxiao Zhu, Aaswath Pattabhi Raman, Ken Xingze Wang, M. A. Anoma, Shanhui Fan. 2014

337 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Standard solar cells heat up under sunlight. The resulting increased temperature of the solar cell has adverse consequences on both its efficiency and its reliability. We introduce a general approach to radiatively lower the operating temperature of a solar cell through sky access, while maintaining its solar absorption. We first present an ideal scheme for the radiative cooling of solar cells. For an example case of a bare crystalline silicon solar cell, we show that the ideal scheme can passively lower its operating temperature by 18.3 K. We then demonstrate a microphotonic design based on real material properties that approaches the performance of the ideal scheme. We also show that the radiative cooling effect is substantial, even in the presence of significant convection and conduction and parasitic solar absorption in the cooling layer, provided that we design the cooling layer to be sufficiently thin.

Subfields: Civil and Structural Engineering, Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/39fd849a4b88447f759a5afaa125653970d1efa8

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Civil and Structural Engineering

1. Zhihua Zhou
2. Junwei Liu
3. W. Feng
4. Ji Zhang
5. Jian Zuo

In Electrical and Electronic Engineering

1. Zhihua Zhou
2. Junwei Liu
3. W. Feng
4. Ji Zhang
5. Jian Zuo

Citations in the corpus

• Advances and challenges in commercializing radiative cooling (2019, background): “If emitters are directly combined with bare photovoltaic panels, the improvement of the actual the conversion efficiency is limited [44,45] and even the service life of solar cells may be reduced due to the poor packaging.”