Calibration of solar cells by the reference cell method - The spectral mismatch problem

The calibration of solar cells by means of solar simulators and calibrated reference cells has always been faced with the problem of errors due to source spectral irradiance mismatch and cell spectral response mismatch. A general expression is derived in this paper to enable calculation of mismatch error. The information required to make this calculation is the relative spectra responses of the test and reference cells, and the relative spectral irradiance of the simulator (over the spectral range defined by cell response). The spectral irradiance of the solar standard is assumed given. Experimental results are presented.