Hydrogenated Amorphous Silicon-Based Thin Film Solar Cell: Optical, Electrical and Structural Properties

Hydrogenated amorphous silicon (a-Si:H) has been developed as an important materials in thin film-based photovoltaic technologies because of considerable cost reduction as a result of low material consumption and low-temperature process. Among the materials used for thin film solar cells, amorphous silicon is the most important material in the commercial production. Despite of these benefits, the efficiency limit for a single band gap thin film based solar cell predicted by Shockley and Queisser (i.e. ~31%) has become a matter of challenge for current research community. Considering the thermodynamic behavior of a single threshold absorber in generating electricity from solar irradiance, this limit seems inevitable, and thus a tremendous investigation is now being carried out in different dimensions such as hot carrier generation, rainbow solar cell, multiple exciton generation, multiband absorber etc. Nonetheless, so far reported efficiency (ηlab~12%) provide enough room to improve and take challenge to reach to the highest value for a-Si:H based solar cell design. Further to improve architectural design as well as engineer the materials, it is indispensable to understand the optical, electrical and structural properties of aSi:H as an active layer. Here in this article, an attempt was taken into account to focus on such characteristics that affect the overall cell efficiency.

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Hydrogenated Amorphous Silicon Based Solar Cells: Optimization Formalism and Numerical Algorithm

MRS Proceedings ◽

10.1557/proc-1153-a07-05 ◽

2009 ◽

Vol 1153 ◽

Author(s):

Anatoli Shkrebtii ◽

Yuriy Kryuchenko ◽

Anaroliy Sachenko ◽

Igor Sokolovskyi ◽

Franco Gaspari

Keyword(s):

Thin Film ◽

Solar Cells ◽

Solar Cell ◽

Amorphous Silicon ◽

Hydrogenated Amorphous Silicon ◽

Amorphous Film ◽

Solar Cell Performance ◽

Transparent Conducting ◽

Silicon Based ◽

Hydrogenated Amorphous

AbstractThin film hydrogenated amorphous silicon (a-Si:H) is widely used in photovoltaics. In order to get the best possible performance of the a-Si:H solar cells it is important to optimize the amorphous film and solar cells in terms their parameters such as mobility gap, p-, i- and n-layer doping levels, electron and hole lifetime and their mobilities, resistance of p-, i- and n-layers, contact grid geometry and parameters of the transparent conducting and antireflecting layers, and others. To maximize thin a-Si:H film based solar cell performance we have developed a general numerical formalism of photoconversion, which takes into account all the above parameters for the optimization. Application of the formalism is demonstrated for typical a-Si:H based solar cells before Staebler-Wronski (SW) light soaking effect. This general formalism is not limited to a-Si:H based systems only, and it can be applied to other types of solar cells as well.

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Numerical Design of Ultrathin Hydrogenated Amorphous Silicon-Based Solar Cell

International Journal of Photoenergy ◽

10.1155/2021/7506837 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 2021 ◽

pp. 1-13

Author(s):

F. X. Abomo Abega ◽

A. Teyou Ngoupo ◽

J. M. B. Ndjaka

Keyword(s):

Solar Cells ◽

Solar Cell ◽

Amorphous Silicon ◽

Buffer Layer ◽

Defect Density ◽

Hydrogenated Amorphous Silicon ◽

Theoretical Work ◽

Silicon Based ◽

The Impact ◽

Hydrogenated Amorphous

Numerical modelling is used to confirm experimental and theoretical work. The aim of this work is to present how to simulate ultrathin hydrogenated amorphous silicon- (a-Si:H-) based solar cells with a ITO BRL in their architectures. The results obtained in this study come from SCAPS-1D software. In the first step, the comparison between the J-V characteristics of simulation and experiment of the ultrathin a-Si:H-based solar cell is in agreement. Secondly, to explore the impact of certain properties of the solar cell, investigations focus on the study of the influence of the intrinsic layer and the buffer layer/absorber interface on the electrical parameters ( J SC , V OC , FF, and η ). The increase of the intrinsic layer thickness improves performance, while the bulk defect density of the intrinsic layer and the surface defect density of the buffer layer/ i -(a-Si:H) interface, respectively, in the ranges [109 cm-3, 1015 cm-3] and [1010 cm-2, 5 × 10 13 cm-2], do not affect the performance of the ultrathin a-Si:H-based solar cell. Analysis also shows that with approximately 1 μm thickness of the intrinsic layer, the optimum conversion efficiency is 12.71% ( J SC = 18.95 mA · c m − 2 , V OC = 0.973 V , and FF = 68.95 % ). This work presents a contribution to improving the performance of a-Si-based solar cells.

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