Contribution of the photoluminescence effect of the stain etched porous silicon in improvement of screen printed silicon solar cell performance

Abstract

In this work, we investigate the potential use of porous silicon (PS) nanostructures stain etched into photovoltaic technology as one possible way to increase the silicon solar cell (SC) efficiency at low cost. The process is based on a combination of texturization and porous silicon formed by metal assisted etching which used the screen printed front grid contact. The photoluminescence (PL), the reflectivity spectra of the PS layers, spectral response and electrical measurements are presented and discussed. As a result, the short circuit current density was improved by more than 21%. We observed an increase in internal quantum efficiency (iQE) in the region where the PL of the PS layers appears and the minority carriers’ diffusion length is enhanced by more than 60 . We report the correlation between the converter PL intensity and iQE and we demonstrate that the photoluminescence properties and the increased photocurrent result in an improvement of the solar cell efficiency.