Thin Amorphous Silicon Solar Cells Research Articles

Improving the Efficiency of Thin Film Amorphous Silicon Solar Cell by Changing the Location and Material of Plasmonic Metallic Nanostructures

In this work we present a 3D-finite difference time domain (FDTD) simulation of ultra thin amorphous silicon solar cell. The optical generation rate and plasmonic resonance enhance absorption in thin film cell in which silver nanoparticles are imbedded inside the depletion region of p-n junction. Here, the operation of thin film solar cell has been analyzed. Here, by inserting the metal nanoparticles within the active layer in the depletion region of the p-n junction, a new structure has been introduced. We have utilized three different materials, gold, silver and aluminium and the efficiencies of 5.27%, 5.3% and 3.74% have been obtained respectively. The results indicate a significant increase in the efficiency of proposed solar cell with silver nanoparticles.

Light-Trapping and Interface Morphologies of Amorphous Silicon Solar Cells on Multiscale Surface Textured Substrates

The short circuit current and quantum efficiency of silicon thin-film solar cells can be increased by using multiscale surface textures consisting of micro- and nanoscale textures. Adding microtextures to the already existing nanosurface textures leads to an increase of the short circuit current from 15.5 mA/cm2 to almost 17 mA/cm2 for thin amorphous silicon solar cells. To gain insights into the light-trapping properties, finite difference time domain simulations were carried out using realistic interface morphologies. The simulations reveal that the gain of the short circuit current is caused by an increased effective thickness of the solar cell and the scattering properties of the microtextured back reflector. The thickness of the solar cells is increased by the growth of the silicon p-i-n diode on the microtextured surface. The influence of the nanoscale and multiscale surface textures on the quantum efficiency and short circuit current will be discussed.

Photoinduced Space Charge Effects in a-Si:H Solar Cells

AbstractWe have investigated charge collection in thin amorphous silicon solar cells under light bias illumination, both experimentally and by numerical simulation. In such charge collection experiments, space charge due to trapped bias-light generated carriers leads to an enhancement of a small signal probe beam charge collection. It is found that this enhancement of the small signal charge collection is strongly dependent on the diode thickness and the defect density in the samples. In particular for thin diodes (d < 0.5 microns) the charge collection enhancement can be shown to increase with light-induced degradation of the devices. The effect of these material parameters as well as other experimental parameters, such as light bias and probe beam photon flux, will be demonstrated by means of numerical simulation.