Abstract
Model calculations were performed to investigate and quantify the effect of trap location and trap-assisted Auger recombination on silicon solar cell performance. Trap location has a significant influence on the lifetime behavior as a function of doping and injected carrier concentration in silicon. It Is shown in this paper that for a high quality silicon (/spl tau/=10 ms at 200 ohm-cm, no intentional doping), high resistivity (/spl ges/200 ohm-cm) is optimum for high efficiency one sun solar cells if the lifetime limiting trap is located near midgap. However, if the trap is shallow (E/sub t/-E/sub v//spl les/0.2 eV), the optimum resistivity shifts to about 0.2 ohm-cm. For a low quality silicon material or technology (10 /spl mu/s at 200 ohm-cm, prior to intentional doping) the optimum base resistivity for one sun solar cells is found to be /spl sim/0.2 ohm-cm, regardless of the trap location. It is shown that the presence of a shallow trap can significantly degrade the performance of a concentrator cell fabricated on high-resistivity high-lifetime silicon material because of an undesirable injection level dependence in the carrier lifetime. The effect of trap assisted Auger recombination on the cell performance has also been modelled in this paper. It is found that the trap-assisted Auger recombination does not influence the one sun cell performance appreciably, but can degrade the concentrator cell performance if the trap-assisted Auger recombination coefficient value exceeds 2/spl times/10/sup -14/ cm/sup 3//s. Therefore, it is necessary to know the starting lifetime as well as trap location in order to specify base resistivity in order to predict or achieve the best cell performance for a given one sun or concentrator cell design.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">></ETX>
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Disclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.