Advanced Modelling of Silicon Wafer Solar Cells

Abstract

Modelling of solar cells today is general practice in research and widely-used in industry. Established modelling software is typically limited to one dimension and/or to small scales. Additionally, novel effects, like, e.g., the use of diffractive structures or luminescent materials, are not established. In this paper we discuss how the combination of different modelling techniques can be used to overcome these limitations. In this context two examples are presented. The first example concerns the combination of the open source simulation software PC1D with circuit modelling to investigate the effect of local shunts on the global characteristics of a silicon wafer solar cell. For the investigated example (4.5 cm2 cell area) we find that a local point shunt reduces the solar cell efficiency by 4% relative. The second example concerns the modelling of diffractive gratings for thin silicon wafer solar cells. For this purpose, we use the rigorous coupled wave analysis to simulate Sentaurus technical computer-aided design (TCAD) is combined with the rigorous coupled wave analysis, a method to solve Maxwell's equations for periodic structures. Here we show that a grating can be used to improve the absorption in a thin silicon wafer solar cell considerably.