City Research Online

Abstract

It has been well documented that the usage of a textured cover layer reduces reflection from the air‐solar cell interface, which ultimately enhances the power conversion efficiency (PCE) of a solar cell. The most commonly used patterns, such as pyramids, micropillars, nanowires (NW), and nanoholes have been widely studied and optimized. Besides using such NWs to enhance light absorption, this work also additionally considers the concept of mimicking the antireflection coating of single or multiple layers in minimizing the reflectance and thus enhancing the total absorptance further. It is shown here that at least one order of magnitude shorter multilayer NW pattern of 268 nm total height can outperform a standard NW of 4270 nm height, which needs less material and can also be fabricated at a reduced cost. Furthermore, the proposed design with reduced height has a significantly lower surface‐to‐volume ratio, which also reduces surface recombination loss than the other textured surface patterns. The results presented in this work have been comprehensively analyzed by initially optimizing optical absorption and then completing the electrical simulations. The optimized design in conjunction with a back reflector offers an efficiency as high as 16.434%.

Publication Type:	Article
Additional Information:	© 2024 The Authors. Energy Science & Engineering published by Society of Chemical Industry and John Wiley & Sons Ltd. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Publisher Keywords:	absorption enhancement, cost reduction, light trapping, nanowires, solar cell, texturing patterns
Subjects:	Q Science > QC Physics T Technology > TA Engineering (General). Civil engineering (General)
Departments:	School of Science & Technology School of Science & Technology > Engineering
SWORD Depositor:	Symplectic Administrator

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