Electrical characteristics of modified truncated cone nanowire for efficient light trapping

Abstract

In this paper, a novel design of truncated cone nanowires (NWs) solar cell (SC) with air gap is studied and analyzed. The optical and electrical characterizations are obtained using Lumerical finite difference time domain (FDTD) and Lumerical Device software packages. The modified truncated cone NWs have an upper air hole gap to increase the light confinement through the suggested design. In this study, ultimate efficiency, short circuit current density (Jsc), open circuit voltage (Voc), fill factor (FF) and power conversion efficiency (PCE) are calculated to compute the optoelectronics performance of the reported NWs. Moreover, the geometrical parameters of the studied design are adjusted to maximize the absorption through the modified structure. Furthermore, the Shockley-Read-Hall (SRH) lifetimes and doping concentrations are tuned to increase the PCE. The investigated NWs achieve an optical ultimate efficiency and Jsc of 42.74 % and 34.98 mA/cm2, respectively with an enhancement of 18.15 % over conventional conical NWs. Further, the radial doping of the reported design shows short circuit current density of 32.16 mA/cm2, open circuit voltage of 0.66 V and PCE of 15.36 %. An electronic implementation of the suggested NWs SC is also made using single diode model which shows a good agreement with the simulation results. Therefore, the suggested NWs design is a promising design for developing low cost and highly efficient SC.