Abstract
The conductivity of transparent front contacts can be improved by patterned metallic nanowires, albeit at the cost of optical loss. The associated optical penalty can be strongly reduced by texturization of the cell stack. Remarkably, the nanowires themselves are not textured and not covered in our design. This was shown by optical modeling where the width of the nanowire, the texture height and the texture period were varied in order to obtain a good insight into the general trends. The optical performance can be improved dramatically as the reflection, which is the largest optical loss, can be reduced by 95% of the original value. The spectra reveal absorption in the Cu(In,Ga)Se2 (CIGS) layer of 95% and reflection below 2% over a large part of the spectrum. In essence, a virtually black CIGS cell stack can be achieved for textured cells with a metal nanogrid. Moreover, it turned out that the ratio between the width of the nanowire and the height of the texture is a critical parameter for optical losses.
Highlights
IntroductionIn the field of thin-film solar cells and display technology, high conductivity and high transparency are vital [1,2,3,4]
Transparent conductors are important for the performance of optoelectronic devices
Metallic nanowires could boost the conductivity of the front conductor in thin-film photovoltaics
Summary
In the field of thin-film solar cells and display technology, high conductivity and high transparency are vital [1,2,3,4]. These transparent conductors are thin layers of doped metal oxide material, the so-called transparent conductive oxides (TCOs) [5,6]. The combination of metallic grids and TCOs was shown to be a good candidate to give a low resistance without compromising the high transmittance [9,10,11,12,13] Such improvement would be highly beneficial for solar cells [14]. The transparency of these metal nanostructures is often below
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