A novel choice for the photovoltaic-thermoelectric hybrid system: the perovskite solar cell

Most of the recent studies about the photovoltaic cell-thermoelectric generator (PV-TEG) hybrid system pay their attention to silicon PV cells. This paper is to estimate the feasibility and features of the integrated system consisting of the emerging perovskite solar cells and thermoelectric modules. The results in this paper show that the temperature coefficient of the perovskite solar cell is lower than 2‰. Because of such a lower temperature coefficient, the efficiency of the perovskite solar cell-TEG hybrid system can amount to 18.6%, while the efficiency of the single perovskite solar cell is 17.8%. Therefore, the perovskite solar cell is a reasonable choice for the PV-TEG hybrid system. By altering the thermal concentration, the volume of the TEG material can be decreased, and the cost of the hybrid system can be remarkably reduced. To study the influence of the thermal concentration on the performance of the hybrid system, a three-dimensional numerical model of the hybrid system is developed in this paper. When the thermal concentration ration is lower than 100, the temperature drop is lower than 3 K, and the decline in the conversion efficiency caused by the thermal concentration can be neglected for the proposed PV-TEG hybrid system. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.