Photonic crystal microcrystalline silicon solar cells
Yoshinori Tanaka,Kenji Ishizaki,Menaka De Zoysa,Takami Umeda,Yosuke Kawamoto,Shoya Fujita,Susumu Noda +6 more
TLDR
In this paper, a method to incorporate photonic crystal structures into thin-film microcrystalline silicon photovoltaic layers while suppressing undesired defects formed in the microcrystaline silicon was proposed.Abstract:
Enhancing the absorption of thin-film microcrystalline silicon solar cells over a broadband range in order to improve the energy conversion efficiency is a very important challenge in the development of low cost and stable solar energy harvesting. Here, we demonstrate that a broadband enhancement of the absorption can be achieved by creating a large number of resonant modes associated with two-dimensional photonic crystal band edges. We utilize higher-order optical modes perpendicular to the silicon layer, as well as the band-folding effect by employing photonic crystal superlattice structures. We establish a method to incorporate photonic crystal structures into thin-film (~500 nm) microcrystalline silicon photovoltaic layers while suppressing undesired defects formed in the microcrystalline silicon. The fabricated solar cells exhibit 1.3 times increase of a short circuit current density (from 15.0 mA/cm2 to 19.6 mA/cm2) by introducing the photonic crystal structure, and consequently the conversion efficiency increases from 5.6% to 6.8%. Moreover, we theoretically analyze the absorption characteristics in the fabricated cell structure, and reveal that the energy conversion efficiency can be increased beyond 9.5% in a structure less than 1/400 as thick as conventional crystalline silicon solar cells with an efficiency of 24%. © 2015 The Authors. Progress in Photovoltaics: Research and Applications published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.read more
Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
Progress in thin-film silicon solar cells based on photonic-crystal structures
TL;DR: In this article, the authors review the recent progress in thin-film silicon solar cells with photonic crystals, where absorption enhancement is achieved by using large-area resonant effects in photonic crystal.
Journal ArticleDOI
Light trapping in thin-film solar cell to enhance the absorption efficiency using FDTD simulation
TL;DR: In this article, a silicon thin-film solar cell was designed with TiO2 anti-reflection layer, aluminum (Al) as reflective layer, and silicon (Si) as absorption layer.
Journal ArticleDOI
Enhanced efficiency of ultrathin (∼500 nm)-film microcrystalline silicon photonic crystal solar cells
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors suppress the parasitic absorption of back-reflector metal and doped layers in photonic crystal microcrystalline silicon solar cells, achieving a high active area current density of 22.6 mA cm−2 for an ultrathin (~500 nm)-film silicon layer and obtain an active area efficiency of ~9.1%.
Journal ArticleDOI
Key Points in the Latest Developments of High-Efficiency Thin-Film Silicon Solar Cells
TL;DR: In this paper, a short overview of thin-film silicon solar cells is presented, where the main driver for the efficiency improvement of micro-crystalline silicon cells was the development of sophisticated light scattering substrates.
Book ChapterDOI
Nanostructuring Solar Cells Using Metallic Nanoparticles
TL;DR: In this article, the role of metallic nanoparticles in thin-film photovoltaics has been discussed and an up-to-date overview of the main experimental achievements of light trapping by metallic nanoparticle arrays in thinfilm solar cells is given.
References
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D. L. Staebler,C. R. Wronski +1 more
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Nanodome Solar Cells with Efficient Light Management and Self-Cleaning
TL;DR: Novel nanodome solar cells, which have periodic nanoscale modulation for all layers from the bottom substrate, through the active absorber to the top transparent contact, are demonstrated, which opens up exciting opportunities for a variety of photovoltaic devices to further improve performance, reduce materials usage, and relieve elemental abundance limitations.
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