Dye-Based Bifacial Silicon Solar Cell Fabrication

Abstract

Abstract: Solar photovoltaic (PV) is a well-known energy harvesting technology or a semiconductor device that is used in generating electricity from the sunlight via the conversion process. Currently, solar photovoltaic is increasingly growing as an alternative renewable energy in conventional power generation. There are two types of solar photovoltaic cells which are monofacial and bifacial solar cells. The difference between these two solar cells is, monofacial, only generate electricity when the light touches the front side whereas the bifacial solar cell does generate electricity from both the front and rear side. In this research project, the bifacial solar cell is used to fulfil the purpose of increasing the power conversion efficiency as it can generate power from both surfaces. The bifacial is known to produce more energy up to 27 % than the monofacial according to the claims of some manufacturers. The base of this bifacial solar cell is silicon. Silicon purely contains an atomic structure that makes it suitable and more stable to be the raw material of a semiconductor due to its behaviour to block and conduct electricity. This is mainly due to silicon having the conductive properties of metal as well as an insulator. The silicon wafer will undergo the whole fabrication process to become the semiconductor devices. However, there is a problem encountered with the PV cell when it is consistently improving and when analysing the potential areas: on the power conversion efficiency. This is one of the challenges that can be solved with a strategy to increase the availability of the photon trapping of the solar cell which we called as the surface passivation of the bifacial solar cell. Surface passivation is a way that can minimise the recombination loss and efficiency loss while enhancing the optical path length of the solar cell on the photon absorption. It is the most significant step to increase the efficiency of the bifacial solar cell which is also known as an anti-reflection coating (ARC) using dye-based coating techniques. The development of the anti-reflection (ARC) lays on the fabrication techniques, optical performance and the light trapping structures as well as their impact on its efficiency