Enhancement in Optical and Electrical Properties of Si and GaAs Solar Cells Using Metal-oxide Anti-reflective Coatings

摘要

In this paper, different electrical and optical properties of two distinguished solar cells based on Si;icon (Si) and Gallium Arsenide (GaAs) have been studied. To improve different performance parameters such as - absorption, short-circuit current density, efficiency of the modelled solar cells, inclusion of metal-oxide based anti-reflective (AR) coatings (ZnO, Al2O3 and TiO2) have been studied. A comparative study and numerical analysis has been performed in this regard. The investigation shows that GaAs-based solar cell provides better overall performance compared to Si-based solar cell. It has also been observed that AR coatings improved the overall solar cell performance significantly in all cases. From this work, it can be observed that TiO2 outperforms the other two AR coatings in all aspects considered in this study.