Electroluminescence Exposes Individual Performances in Multi-Junction Cells

Conventional multi-junction cell measurements only yield the characteristics of the entire device. In stark contrast, a novel electroluminescence approach can probe far deeper, extracting the current-voltage curves for individual sub-cells that hold the key to optimising the overall conversion efficiency, say the technique s pioneers, Raymond Hoheisel, Sebastian Rönsch, Frank Dimroth and Andreas Bett from the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems and Helmut Nesswetter and Claus Zimmermann from EADS Astrium.