Abstract
An efficient optical antireflective (AR) structure plays a vital role in high-performance thin-film solar cells. Here, we design a surface relief AR structure consisting of a two-dimensional (2D) array of a subwavelength ring and pillar-shaped feature, capable of suppressing optical reflection over a wide spectral window of the solar spectrum. Our simulations show that the weighted average reflectance of the subwavelength AR structure is as low as 4.2% in the 400–1100 nm spectral range in the normal incidence condition and almost 10-fold reduction compared with a bare silicon surface. When placed on the front side of a simple Si thin-film photovoltaic solar cell, this subwavelength AR structure leads to an improved light absorption with simulated results showing an increase of 53% short-circuit current compared to a flat solar cell. Besides, our simulations show that this AR structure could, in principle, perform well against reasonable fabrication errors.
Highlights
With the degradation of the environment and climate change on earth, renewable energy has become a key theme in sustainable social development
Moth-eye structure and regular or random pyramids can be used in solar cells to improve light absorption efficiency [11, 12] because they increase effective optical scattering paths to allow more photons to be absorbed. ey are often used in wafer-based silicon solar cells, which have a typical active layer thickness on the order of 10 μm
It is a periodic structure that can be integrated onto the surface of the top silicon layer of solar cells
Summary
With the degradation of the environment and climate change on earth, renewable energy has become a key theme in sustainable social development. Along this direction, there have been many proposed and demonstrated outstanding absorption enhancing nanostructures, for instance, tungsten elliptical arrays on monolayer molybdenum disulfide, trapezoid-pyramidal structure-based PEDOT: PSS/c-Ge, Ag nanoparticles, and TiO2-inverted triangular prism, Ti ring on SiO2-Si3N4-Ti thin films [15,16,17,18,19]. There have been many proposed and demonstrated outstanding absorption enhancing nanostructures, for instance, tungsten elliptical arrays on monolayer molybdenum disulfide, trapezoid-pyramidal structure-based PEDOT: PSS/c-Ge, Ag nanoparticles, and TiO2-inverted triangular prism, Ti ring on SiO2-Si3N4-Ti thin films [15,16,17,18,19] Notice that these nanostructures all require heterogeneous integration of exterior materials, complicating the device fabrication processes and potentially defeats the purpose of lowering the solar cells’ cost. The fabrication tolerance analysis shows that our subwavelength AR structure can have geometric tolerance to a certain extend
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