Design of optimum rear passivated submicron Al corrugation in very thin textured silicon back-contact back-junction solar cell for absorption enhancement up to near-infrared region

Mohd Faizol Abdullah; Abdul Manaf Hashim

doi:10.1117/1.JPE.8.014501

20 February 2018 Design of optimum rear passivated submicron Al corrugation in very thin textured silicon back-contact back-junction solar cell for absorption enhancement up to near-infrared region

Mohd Faizol Abdullah, Abdul Manaf Hashim

Author Affiliations +

Journal of Photonics for Energy, Vol. 8, Issue 1, 014501 (February 2018). https://doi.org/10.1117/1.JPE.8.014501

Abstract

The optical reflection and absorption in a very thin textured back-contact back-junction silicon (Si) solar cell are investigated. The introduction of nanotexturing on front Si surface has significantly increased the absorption in the ultraviolet (UV)–visible region with a low reflection of below 0.05. The introduction of rear surface corrugation formed by a combination of SiO2-Al has successfully enhanced the absorption up to near-infrared (NI) region. The optimum crest width, periodicity, and trough depth of corrugation are derived, which lead to high absorption up to 0.97. The internal reflection and scattering that occur near the plasmonic Al corrugation are contributing to the local maximum electric field intensity in both transverse magnetic (TM) and transverse electric (TE) modes. Since there is no perpendicular electric component in TE mode, a coupling of electric field within a corrugation trough is not observed but is only observed in TM mode. On 10-μm-thick Si, the application of Si nanocones (NCs) and optimized rear Al corrugation results in 56% improvement in photogenerated current, Jsc, compared to the reference flat Si. Thinning down the Si to only 2 μm severely limits the Jsc. Our optimized Al corrugation manages to compensate net 9% and 7% Jsc loss in 2-μm Si in respect to 10-μm-thick Si for the model with and without front Si NCs. The results seem to reveal the optimum design of rear Al corrugation for the absorption enhancement from UV up to NI wavelength region.

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Mohd Faizol Abdullah and Abdul Manaf Hashim "Design of optimum rear passivated submicron Al corrugation in very thin textured silicon back-contact back-junction solar cell for absorption enhancement up to near-infrared region," Journal of Photonics for Energy 8(1), 014501 (20 February 2018). https://doi.org/10.1117/1.JPE.8.014501

Received: 13 August 2017; Accepted: 19 January 2018; Published: 20 February 2018

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KEYWORDS

Silicon

Aluminum

Absorption

Reflection

Solar cells

Ultraviolet radiation

Scattering

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