Abstract
Light trapping and photon management of silicon thin film solar cells can be improved by a separate optimization of the front and back contact textures. A separate optimization of the front and back contact textures is investigated by optical simulations taking realistic device geometries into consideration. The optical simulations are confirmed by experimentally realized 1 μm thick microcrystalline silicon solar cells. The different front and back contact textures lead to an enhancement of the short circuit current by 1.2 mA/cm2 resulting in a total short circuit current of 23.65 mA/cm2 and an energy conversion efficiency of 8.35%.
Highlights
We have investigated the influence of multiscale texture on the optics of amorphous silicon solar cells[23,27]
The light trapping properties of silicon thin film solar cells can be improved by separately optimizing the front and the back contact textures
Optimal surface textures are determined by taking realistic interface morphology into account
Summary
A Finite Difference Time Domain (FDTD) method is used to simulate the optical wave propagation within the solar cells in three dimensions[8,9,11,14,23,27,30]. The 3D FDTD simulations take the calculated 3D interface morphologies (see Supplementary Information Figs S1–S3) and film thickness as input parameters in order to model the 3D solar cell structures. Afterwards, the quantum efficiency (QE) is calculated as the ratio of the power absorbed in the i-layer with respect to the total power incident on the unit cell. It is assumed that the collection efficiency of the real solar cell is close to 100% This assumption is valid because high quality microcrystalline silicon material is used in this study. Details on the calculations of these parameters are given in literature[23]
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