Study of the Electron Lifetime in Crystalline and Multicrystalline Si Solar Cells

Abstract

Crystalline (including multicrystalline) silicon based devices dominate the present solar cell industry due to their durability, relatively low cost, and the vast silicon knowledge base developed by the microelectronics industry. Multicrystalline silicon is the becoming dominating substrate material of the photovoltaic cells. This is obviously due to the significant cost savings compared with the single crystalline silicon wafers. Consequently, the conversion efficiency of the mc-Si solar cell is suffering because of the low cost requirement of the starting materials. One contributor to the lower performance of the mc-Si cells is the grain boundaries which reduce the charge carrier collection properties. Thus, reducing solar cell fabricate is an attractive way to reduce material costs. However, the model calculations in the presented paper show that the rear surface recombination velocity (S) in multicrystalline silicon cell is greater than (mc-Si) cell and the efficiency of mc-Si cell is lower than the efficiency of a crystalline cell.