Analysis of silicon-based integrated photovoltaic-electrochemical hydrogen generation system under varying temperature and illumination

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• 作者：Vishwa Bhatt^a ; Brijesh Tripathi^b ; Pankaj Yadav^c ; Manoj Kumar^b ; ^{manoj.kumar@sse.pdpu.ac.in}
• 关键词：Polycrystalline silicon ; Electrochemical cell ; Electrochemical impedance spectroscopy ; Integrated PV&ndash ; EC system
• 刊名：Journal of Energy Chemistry
• 出版年：2017
• 出版时间：January 2017
• 年：2017
• 卷：26
• 期：1
• 页码：72-80
• 全文大小：2622 K
• 卷排序：26

文摘

Last decade witnessed tremendous research and development in the area of photo-electrolytic hydrogen generation using chemically stable nanostructured photo-cathode/anode materials. Due to intimately coupled charge separation and photo-catalytic processes, it is very difficult to optimize individual components of such system leading to a very low demonstrated solar-to-fuel efficiency (SFE) of less than 1%. Recently there has been growing interest in an integrated photovoltaic–electrochemical (PV–EC) system based on GaAs solar cells with the demonstrated SFE of 24.5% under concentrated illumination condition. But a high cost of GaAs based solar cells and recent price drop of poly-crystalline silicon (pc-Si) solar cells motivated researchers to explore silicon based integrated PV–EC system. In this paper a theoretical framework is introduced to model silicon-based integrated PV–EC device. The theoretical framework is used to analyze the coupling and kinetic losses of a silicon solar cell based integrated PV–EC water splitting system under varying temperature and illumination. The kinetic loss occurs in the range of 19.1%–27.9% and coupling loss takes place in the range of 5.45%–6.74% with respect to varying illumination in the range of 20–100 mW/cm2. Similarly, the effect of varying temperature has severe impact on the performance of the system, wherein the coupling loss occurs in the range of 0.84%–21.51% for the temperature variation from 25 to 50 °C.