Effect of cell thickness on the electrical and optical properties of thin film silicon solar cell

Abstract

In this work Electrical and optical properties of silicon thin films with different thickness were measured. The thickness of the Si films varied from 100 to 800μm. The optical properties of the cell were studied at different thickness. A maximum achievable current density (MACD) generated by a planar solar cell, was measured for different values of the cell thickness which was performed by using photovoltaic (PV) optics method. It was found that reducing the values of the cell thickness improves the open-circuit voltage (VOC) and the fill factor (FF) of the solar cell. The optical properties were measured for thin film Si (TF-Si) at different thickness by using the double beam UV-vis-NIR spectrophotometer in the wavelength range of 300–2000nm. Some of optical parameters such as refractive index with dispersion relation, the dispersion energy, the oscillator energy, optical band gap energy were calculated by using the spectra for the TF-Si with different thickness.