Light Harvesting Improvement of a-Si:H Solar Cell Through Nano-Grating Structure and Plasmonic Nanoparticles

摘要

In this work, the optical and electrical properties of hydrogenated amorphous silicon (a-Si:H) solar cells have been optimized, especially near the infrared region. A new structure is proposed, where Graphene is used as an antireflection transparent conductive anode layer. The proposed structure produces maximum short-circuit current density obtained of 18.22 mA/cm(2), a fill factor of 86%, an open circuit voltage of 804 mV and its overall efficiency is 12.61%. The power absorption is increased to 90% in the near-infrared region. Furthermore, the effect of temperature on the electrical properties of the proposed structure is investigated. Finite difference time domain method is used to optimize the thicknesses of Pin layer by measuring both the overall optical absorption of the proposed solar cell and the short-circuit current density. Additionally, an electro-optical model is developed to calculate the open circuit voltage, the fill factor and the overall power efficiency of the proposed structure. The effect of both the active layer texturing, and the different upper and lower layers slopes, of the solar cell performance are justified for a unit cell. Moreover, the impact of gold nanoparticles distribution on both textured surfaces with different surface densities is introduced.