Some Interesting Analytical Approaches to Simulate Photovoltaic Devices

Abstract

The use of rather powerful standard software packages to simulate solar cells gives rise to a whole industry of purely numerical studies, which suggest new types of bulk materials and device layouts, and which are often NOT confirmed by experimental studies. Apart from practical challenges during the fabrication of real devices, the reason for major discrepancies between numerical and experimental studies might be the usual suspects, i.e. the use of numerical concepts and techniques outside their range of validity, and the use of unrealistic materials parameters. In the following, we would like to briefly illustrate and advertise a fascinating and very powerful analytical framework to verify some of the key numerical features of standard device simulations, which is based on Laplace transforms and Riemann integrals.