Development of high-efficiency solar cell modules for photovoltaic-powered vehicles

Photovoltaic (PV)-powered vehicles is expected to play a critical role in a future carbon neutrality society because it has been reported that the on-board PVs have great ability to reduce CO2 emission from the transport sector. Although the demonstration car with III-V based solar cell module has shown the PV-powered driving range of 36.6km/day at solar irradiance of 6.2kWh/m2/day, practical driving ranges of PV-powered vehicles are shown to be lower than estimated values due to some losses such as non-radiative recombination and resistance losses of solar cell modules under sunshine condition. This paper presents analytical results for effects of illumination intensity properties of various solar cell modules on the PV-powered driving range in order to develop highly efficient solar cell modules for vehicle integrated applications. The analysis show that improvements in shunt resistance and saturation current density of solar cell modules is necessary in order to improve illumination intensity properties of solar cell modules under low intensity sunshine condition. The calculations show that the III-V based 3-junction solar cell modules with an efficiency of more than 30% have potential PV-powered driving range of 30 km/day average and more than 50 km/day on a clear day.

YAMAGUCHI Masafumi;  OZAKI Ryo;  NAKAMURA Kyotaro;  LEE Kan-Hua;  KOJIMA Nobuaki;  OHSHITA Yoshio;  MASUDA Taizo;  OKUMURA Kenichi;  SATOU Akinori;  NAKADO Takashi;  YAMADA Kazumi;  ARAKI Kenji;  OTA Yasuyuki;  NISHIOKA Kensuke;  TAKAMOTO Tatsuya;  ZUSHI Yusuke;  TANIMOTO Tsutomu;  THIEL Christian;  TSAKALIDIS Anastasios;  JAEGER-WALDAU Arnulf; 

2021-09-20

WILEY-V C H VERLAG GMBH

JRC125732

2367-198X (online),   

https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC125732,   

10.1002/solr.202100429 (online),