Light absorption enhancement in ultrathin film solar cell with embedded dielectric nanowires

Mahmoud A Elrabiaey,Mohamed Farhat O Hameed,Salah S A Obayya,Mohamed Hussein

doi:10.1038/s41598-020-74453-7

Abstract

A novel design of thin-film crystalline silicon solar cell (TF C-Si-SC) is proposed and numerically analyzed. The reported SC has 1.0 µm thickness of C-Si with embedded dielectric silicon dioxide nanowires (NWs). The introduced NWs increase the light scattering in the active layer which improves the optical path length and hence the light absorption. The SC geometry has been optimized using particle swarm optimization (PSO) technique to improve the optical and electrical characteristics. The suggested TF C-Si-SC with two embedded NWs offers photocurrent density ({J}_{ph}) of 32.8 mA cm−2 which is higher than 18 mA cm−2 of the conventional thin film SC with an enhancement of 82.2%. Further, a power conversion efficiency of 15.9% is achieved using the reported SC.

Highlights

A novel design of thin-film crystalline silicon solar cell (TF C-Si-SC) is proposed and numerically analyzed
The active layer with plasmonic nanoparticles suffers from electrical degradation, owing to the plasmonic high surface recombination velocity (SRV) ( 106 cm s−1) at the Si/plasmonic interface[7]
We propose and analyze a new design approach for enhancing the efficiency of Thin film (TF)-SCs with a thickness of 1 μm

Summary

Design consideration and numerical results

TF-SC with embedded dielectric sphere and nanowire are equal to 20%, 24.65%, and 27.674%, respectively The coupled optical/electrical modeling techniques are used to explore the cell performance of the proposed SC with three dielectric embedded elements (sphere, single NW, and two NWs) and compered with the conventional baseline SC These designs are optically simulated using computational domain of 1 μm × 1 μm with height of 3 μm with minimum mesh size of 8.0 nm. The optimized design offers Jph of 30.2 mA cm−2 and 32.8 mA cm−2, respectively which exceed the Lambertian limit for 1.0 μm TF C-Si-SC17 This enhancement is mainly attributed to the presence of embedded NWs as dielectric scatters.

NW 2 NWs

Conclusion