Abstract
Silicon nanowire arrays have been shown to demonstrate light trapping properties and promising potential for next-generation photovoltaics. In this paper, we show that the absorption enhancement in vertical nanowire arrays on a perfectly electric conductor can be further improved through tilting. Vertical nanowire arrays have a 66.2% improvement in ultimate efficiency over an ideal double-pass thin film of the equivalent amount of material. Tilted nanowire arrays, with the same amount of material, exhibit improved performance over vertical nanowire arrays across a broad range of tilt angles (from 38° to 72°). The optimum tilt of 53° has an improvement of 8.6% over that of vertical nanowire arrays and 80.4% over that of the ideal double-pass thin film. Tilted nanowire arrays exhibit improved absorption over the solar spectrum compared with vertical nanowires since the tilt allows for the excitation of additional modes besides the HE 1m modes that are excited at normal incidence. We also observed that tilted nanowire arrays have improved performance over vertical nanowire arrays for a large range of incidence angles (under about 60°).
Highlights
Much solar cell research has focused on silicon (Si) nanowires, which have been demonstrated to be a promising active layer material for next-generation solar cells [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10]
We have performed a comparative study of the optical performances of tilted Si nanowire arrays on a perfectly electric conductor for photovoltaic applications using the finite difference time domain method
Our results show that the absorption enhancement in vertical nanowire arrays over Si thin films can be further improved through tilted nanowires
Summary
Much solar cell research has focused on silicon (Si) nanowires, which have been demonstrated to be a promising active layer material for next-generation solar cells [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10]. Nanowires have demonstrated light trapping properties, where their absorption is enhanced over that of planar Si [1,2,3,9]. These structures may be deposited on low-cost or flexible substrates using chemical vapor deposition or contact transfer methods [12]. Tilting vertical nanowire arrays, which may be fabricated by a wet chemical etching with dry metal deposition method [17], may be an additional and simple way to
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