Experimental review of series resistance for III-V concentrator solar cells

Fourteen solar cell series resistance determination methods are tested for their ability to experimentally determine the series resistance of a III-V concentrator solar cell. For this purpose the series resistance is determined for a range of concentration ratios, the precision is measured and the accuracy by which a known additional resistance can be determined is tested. Only five of the methods perform adequately, but even these should be applied with care since they are either very sensitive to changes in cell temperature or only perform well at relatively high concentration ratios. None of the best values obtained with these five methods deviates more than 3.0 mg(2) from their weighted average of 26.0 m Omega. The methods of Wolf & Rauschenbach and Aberle et al. were found to perform the best. It would, therefore, be preferable if the International Electrotechnical Commission adopted one of these methods as its series resistance determination standard, instead of its current method which is that of Swanson. Several methods that require only a single IV-curve to determine the series resistance are suitable to determine relative series resistance values. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.