Solar Cell Types and Technologies with Applications in Energy Harvesting

Energy harvesting using solar cells is a domain that has received a lot of interest and improvement in the recent years. Various techniques and new materials have been proposed in order to attain this purpose. Our paper has the goal to present the main types of solar cells, comparing their advantages and shortcomings, together with the most recent technologies proposed for energy harvesting by using solar cells. It reviews state-of-the-art solutions in this domain and may be a helpful reference for the researcher in order to obtain a thorough view of the present stage of the studies in this field and also as a starting point for new solutions towards increasing the efficiency of such devices. We also performed simulations of some solar cell structures in order to determine their performance parameters and to compare them with the ones mentioned in the literature.