Efficiency improvement of a silicon-based thin-film solar cell using plasmonic silver nanoparticles and an antireflective layer

Abstract

This paper presents a silicon thin-film solar cell (TFSC) integrated with the silver nanoparticles. It consists of anti-reflection, absorption and reflective layers in which the anti-reflective layer is made of pyramids of TiO2. The purpose of this structure is to allow sunlight to enter the cell at any angle with the minimum reflection and absorption in the wavelength range of 300–1100 nm. The absorbing layer is composed of silicon and when sunlight enters this layer, the molecular bonds break down and release many electrons due to its high absorption coefficient. In this layer, silver spherical nanoparticles are placed to increase the absorption of solar energy by the localized surface plasmon resonances, which will increase the efficiency of the TFSC. The last layer of the structure is a reflective surface of aluminum, which aims to reflect the light into the upper layer to enhance its absorption. We will calculate the key performance metrics for a solar cell such as short-circuit current, open-circuit voltage, fill-factor, and photovoltaic efficiency considering the effects of recombination between silicon substrate and other materials. The numerical results based on the finite-difference time-domain method reveal that the proposed structure has much more absorption due to the anti-reflection layer and the presence of silver nanoparticles that leads to light scattering, light localization, and guided mode excitation compared to conventional TFSC. Our simulations based on the finite-element method show the presented TFSC integrated with silver nanoparticles has a fill-factor of 0.82 and an efficiency of 16.18%.