Study on light-capture performance of silicon thin-film hollow waveguide solar cells

Abstract

Preliminary studies have found that hollow waveguide solar cell is expected to be able to make full use of sunlight and enhance the application level of existing planar silicon thin film solar cell. However, it is still an urgent problem to quantitatively evaluate the light injection capability of this type of hollow waveguide solar cell. A silicon thin-film hollow waveguide solar cell capable of capturing more light was proposed based on transfer-matrix simulations of reflectivity of a traditional multilayered silicon solar cell. The light capture of the waveguide solar cell was evaluated using Ray model under different light illumination conditions. The numerical results agree with the experimental results. The waveguide layers, hollow core size, waveguide length and the maximum light launching angle influence the light capture performance of the waveguide cell. A single-junction silicon thin-film hollow waveguide solar cell is able to achieve the energy absorption efficiency of a multi-junction planar silicon solar cell.