scholarly journals Electrical and Capacitance Diagnostic Techniques as a Support for the Development of Silicon Heterojunction Solar Cells

2014 ◽  
Vol 65 (2) ◽  
pp. 111-115 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miroslav Mikolášek ◽  
Michal Nemec ◽  
Jaroslav Kováč ◽  
Ladislav Harmatha ◽  
Lukáš Minařík

Abstract In this paper we present the utilization of capacitance and current-voltage diagnostic techniques to analyse silicon heterojunction solar cell structures properties, particularly focused on the inspection of the amorphous emitter and amorphous silicon/crystalline silicon hetero-interface. The capacitance characterization of investigated samples have revealed the need for improvement of the a-Si:H/c-Si heterointerface quality as a main direction to obtain superior output performance of heterojunction cells. In addition, current-voltage characterization emphasized importance for enhancement of the light management in the structure. The obtained results demonstrate that electrical and capacitance diagnostic techniques can represents important diagnostic tools in the process of optimization of solar cells.

2015 ◽  
Vol 1770 ◽  
pp. 7-12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henriette A. Gatz ◽  
Yinghuan Kuang ◽  
Marcel A. Verheijen ◽  
Jatin K. Rath ◽  
Wilhelmus M.M. (Erwin) Kessels ◽  
...  

ABSTRACTSilicon heterojunction solar cells (SHJ) with thin intrinsic layers are well known for their high efficiencies. A promising way to further enhance their excellent characteristics is to enable more light to enter the crystalline silicon (c-Si) absorber of the cell while maintaining a simple cell configuration. Our approach is to replace the amorphous silicon (a-Si:H) emitter layer with a more transparent nanocrystalline silicon oxide (nc-SiOx:H) layer. In this work, we focus on optimizing the p-type nc-SiOx:H material properties, grown by radio frequency plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition (rf PECVD), on an amorphous silicon layer.20 nm thick nanocrystalline layers were successfully grown on a 5 nm a-Si:H layer. The effect of different ratios of trimethylboron to silane gas flow rates on the material properties were investigated, yielding an optimized material with a conductivity in the lateral direction of 7.9×10-4 S/cm combined with a band gap of E04 = 2.33 eV. Despite its larger thickness as compared to a conventional window a-Si:H p-layer, the novel layer stack of a-Si:H(i)/nc-SiOx:H(p) shows significantly enhanced transmission compared to the stack with a conventional a-Si:H(p) emitter. Altogether, the chosen material exhibits promising characteristics for implementation in SHJ solar cells.


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