Showing results: 1 - 5 of 5 items found.
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Optosolar GmbH
Flashlight Solar Simulators have the advantage of negligible temperature change to the solar cell. For this reason, they are primarily used in cell and module production environments. Also, they are a more budgetary alternative if large cell areas are to be illuminated, because it is easier to have excellent light uniformity on areas of 8 in x 8 in or larger. So, this type of solar simulator is also used for analysis of large area thin film solar cells. But care must be taken, as some materials (e.g. CIGS) have long inherent time constants, so that the pulse length (better: flash plateau) must be chosen accordingly.
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Optosolar GmbH
This type of solar simulator uses Xenon high pressure arc lamps as light source. These lamps have a colour temperature near 5800 K, so it is feasible to filter the light output to an excellent AM 1.5 spectrum. If a tuneability of the spectrum is required, these lamps can be combined with tungsten lamps to achieve multi-source solar simulators. These can be used to measure tandem/triple/multijunction solar cells. They also allow detailed analysis of all types of solar cells using a spectral metric (see : Publication List).
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Optosolar GmbH
Optosolar offers solar simulators with continuous light for small area solar cells (ca. 10mm x 10mm). depending on the cell size, the concentration ratio can exceed 1000 suns. Special designs cover low concentration on large area wafers (156mm x 156mm), as well as line focus applications (e.g. 8mm x 156mm at 8 suns). Flashlight Solar Simulators have the advantage of negligible temperature change to the solar cell. For this reason, they are often used for very high concentration ratios or for multijunction cells in a solar simulator with adjustable spectrum.
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Optosolar GmbH
For series connected multijunction cells, at a given spectrum (e.g. AM 1.5 or AM 0 for space solar cells), one of the cells will limit the current in the series connection of cells. All solar simulators deviate from the true AM 1.5 spectrum, and they are only classified in wide spectral bands (100nm width). So even for class A or A+ solar simulators, it can easily happen that the bandgaps of the multijunction cells are such distributed that the 'wrong' cell will limit the current, if a solar simulator with fixed spectrum is used. In the 70s and 80s, when these measurements were first developed, intercomparisons showed deviations of cell efficiency in fixed spectrum solar simulators of more than 40%.
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Optosolar GmbH
Solar simulators enable the measurement of (dark and) light IV characteristics and of power and efficiency of photovoltaic An artificial light source is used to create illumination conditions that are similar to those in natural sunlight. International standards hosted by ASTM, IEC and JIS allow to classify the properties of a solar simulator with respect to spatial light uniformity, spectral content of the light and time variation of intensity.
