PC2D: A circular-reference spreadsheet solar cell device simulator

Summary form only given. This paper presents a new silicon solar cell device simulator that models two-dimensional effects entirely within a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, by implementing an iterative solution of cell formulas containing circular references. The easy-to-understand user interface for problem setup and evaluation makes this 2D program a natural companion to PC1D. The solution region is divided into a 20-by-20 grid of rectangular finite elements. Each spreadsheet entry represents the value of a solution variable at a node. This makes it easy to plot 1D or 2D graphs of the variables using the built-in spreadsheet graphic functions. The complex physics in the near-surface region is replaced by surface boundary conditions using a version of the conductive-boundary model recently published by Brendel. Example device simulations will be shown and explained for a selective-emitter (SE) cell, an emitter-wrap-through (EWT) cell, and an interdigitated-back-contact (IBC) cell.