Biomimetic and plasmonic hybrid light trapping for highly efficient ultrathin crystalline silicon solar cells

Innovative Strategies for Photons Management on Ultrathin Silicon Solar Cells

Silicon (Si), the eighth most common element in the known universe by mass and widely applied in the industry of electronics chips and solar cells, rarely emerges as a pure element in the Earth's crust. Optimizing its manufacturing can be crucial in the global challenge of reducing the cost of renewable energy modules and implementing sustainable development goals in the future. In the industry of solar cells, this challenge is stimulating studies of ultrathin Si-based architectures, which are rapidly attracting broad attention. Ultrathin solar cells require up to two orders of magnitude less Si than conventional solar cells, and owning to a flexible nature, they are opening applications in different industries that conventional cells do not yet serve. Despite these attractive factors, a difficulty in ultrathin Si solar cells is overcoming the weak light absorption at near-infrared wavelengths. The primary goal in addressing this problem is scaling up cost-effective and innovative textures for anti-reflection and light-trapping with shallower depth junctions, which can offer similar performances to traditional thick modules. This review provides an overview of this area of research, discussing this field both as science and engineering and highlighting present progress and future outlooks.

Graphene Metamaterial 3D Conformal Coating for Enhanced Light Harvesting

Silicon (Si) photovoltaic devices present possible avenues for overcoming global energy and environmental challenges. The high reflection and surface recombination losses caused by the Si interface and its nanofabrication process are the main hurdles for pursuing a high energy conversion efficiency. However, recent advances have demonstrated great success in improving device performance via proper Si interface modification with the optical and electrical features of two-dimensional (2D) materials. Firmly integrating large-area 2D materials with 3D Si nanostructures with no gap in between, which is essential for optimizing device performance, has rarely been achieved by any technique due to the complex 3D morphology of the nanostructures. Here we propose the concept of a 3D conformal coating of graphene metamaterials, in which the 2D graphene layers perfectly adapt to the 3D Si curvatures, leading to a universal 20% optical reflection decrease and a 60% surface passivation improvement. In a further application of this metamaterial 3D conformal coating methodology to standard Si solar cells, an overall 23% enhancement of the solar energy conversion efficiency is achieved. The 3D conformal coating strategy could be readily extended to various optoelectronic and semiconductor device systems with peculiar performance, offering a pathway for highly efficient energy-harvesting and storage solutions.

Broadband and Highly Directional Visible Light Scattering by Laser-Splashed Lossless TiO2 Nanoparticles

All-dielectric nanoparticles, as the counterpart of metallic nanostructures have recently attracted significant interest in manipulating light-matter interaction at a nanoscale. Directional scattering, as an important property of nanoparticles, has been investigated in traditional high refractive index materials, such as silicon, germanium and gallium arsenide in a narrow band range. Here in this paper, we demonstrate that a broadband forward scattering across the entire visible range can be achieved by the low loss TiO₂ nanoparticles with moderate refractive index. This mainly stems from the optical interferences between the broadband electric dipole and the magnetic dipole modes. The forward/backward scattering ratio reaches maximum value at the wavelengths satisfying the first Kerker’s condition. Experimentally, the femtosecond pulsed laser was employed to splash different-sized nanoparticles from a thin TiO₂ film deposited on the glass substrate. Single particle scattering measurement in both the forward and backward direction was performed by a homemade confocal microscopic system, demonstrating the broadband forward scattering feature. Our research holds great promise for many applications such as light harvesting, photodetection and on-chip photonic devices and so on.

Enhancement in photocurrent by dual-interface period-mismatched rotating rectangle grating-based c-Si solar cells

A dual-interface period-mismatched rotating rectangular grating structure was designed for crystalline silicon thin film solar cells. The relevant parameters of the grating structures were optimized, and the absorption enhancement mechanisms were also explained by optoelectronic simulation analysis. The numerical results show that the rotating rectangular structure can improve the light-trapping performance by coupling light into the c-Si film to excite the waveguide mode and localized surface plasmon resonances. Moreover, it is found that the light-trapping effect of the rear grating rotating structure is better than that of the front grating rotating structure, because the rear interface can better excite localized surface plasmon resonances. The photocurrent density of the dual-interface period-mismatched rotating rectangular grating structure is increased to $18.01\; {\rm mA/cm}^2$, which is 76.05% higher than that of the planar 300 nm thick c-Si structure. The research results provide general guidance for the design of grating structures for thin-film solar cells.

Nanostructures for Light Trapping in Thin Film Solar Cells

Thin film solar cells are one of the important candidates utilized to reduce the cost of photovoltaic production by minimizing the usage of active materials. However, low light absorption due to low absorption coefficient and/or insufficient active layer thickness can limit the performance of thin film solar cells. Increasing the absorption of light that can be converted into electrical current in thin film solar cells is crucial for enhancing the overall efficiency and in reducing the cost. Therefore, light trapping strategies play a significant role in achieving this goal. The main objectives of light trapping techniques are to decrease incident light reflection, increase the light absorption, and modify the optical response of the device for use in different applications. Nanostructures utilize key sets of approaches to achieve these objectives, including gradual refractive index matching, and coupling incident light into guided modes and localized plasmon resonances, as well as surface plasmon polariton modes. In this review, we discuss some of the recent developments in the design and implementation of nanostructures for light trapping in solar cells. These include the development of solar cells containing photonic and plasmonic nanostructures. The distinct benefits and challenges of these schemes are also explained and discussed.

Biomimetic spiral grating for stable and highly efficient absorption in crystalline silicon thin-film solar cells

By emulating the phyllotaxis structure of natural plants, which has an efficient and stable light capture capability, a two-dimensional spiral grating is introduced on the surface of crystalline silicon solar cells to obtain both efficient and stable light absorption. Using the rigorous coupled wave analysis method, the absorption performance on structural parameter variations of spiral gratings is investigated firstly. Owing to diffraction resonance and excellent superficies antireflection, the integrated absorption of the optimal spiral grating cell is raised by about 77 percent compared with the conventional slab cell. Moreover, though a 15 percent deviation of structural parameters from the optimal spiral grating is applied, only a 5 percent decrease of the absorption is observed. This reveals that the performance of the proposed grating would tolerate large structural variations. Furthermore, the angular and polarization dependence on the absorption of the optimized cell is studied. For average polarizations, a small decrease of only 11 percent from the maximum absorption is observed within an incident angle ranging from -70 to 70 degrees. The results show promising application potentials of the biomimetic spiral grating in the solar cell.

Full-spectrum light management by pseudo-disordered moth-eye structures for thin film solar cells

In this paper, the role of pseudo-disordered moth-eye structures on the optical features for application to thin-film solar cells is investigated to realize the superior light management for the full-spectrum solar energy utilization, compared with some ordered structures. Without loss of generality, the c-Si thin film solar cell is taken as the example. The results demonstrate that the fluctuations introduced into the geometry parameters of moth-eye elements can lead to the remarkable absorption enhancement in the wavelength region of 0.3-1.1 μm and high transmission in the wavelength range of 1.1-2.5 μm. Two mechanisms including the increasing spectral density of modes and the intensive forescattering intensity are identified to be responsible for the absorption enhancement. In addition, the optical characteristics of the moth-eye surface with both disordered height and disordered diameter are insensitive to the incident angle.

High-Performance Ultrathin Organic-Inorganic Hybrid Silicon Solar Cells via Solution-Processed Interface Modification

Organic-inorganic hybrid solar cells based on n-type crystalline silicon and poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene)-poly(styrenesulfonate) exhibited promising efficiency along with a low-cost fabrication process. In this work, ultrathin flexible silicon substrates, with a thickness as low as tens of micrometers, were employed to fabricate hybrid solar cells to reduce the use of silicon materials. To improve the light-trapping ability, nanostructures were built on the thin silicon substrates by a metal-assisted chemical etching method (MACE). However, nanostructured silicon resulted in a large amount of surface-defect states, causing detrimental charge recombination. Here, the surface was smoothed by solution-processed chemical treatment to reduce the surface/volume ratio of nanostructured silicon. Surface-charge recombination was dramatically suppressed after surface modification with a chemical, associated with improved minority charge-carrier lifetime. As a result, a power conversion efficiency of 9.1% was achieved in the flexible hybrid silicon solar cells, with a substrate thickness as low as ∼14 μm, indicating that interface engineering was essential to improve the hybrid junction quality and photovoltaic characteristics of the hybrid devices.

Influence of periodic texture profile and parameters for enhanced light absorption in amorphous silicon ultra-thin solar cells

We have investigated the antireflection and light trapping properties of two-dimensional grating arrays in the hexagonal symmetry with various texture morphologies. Optical simulation based on finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) analysis is carried out to understand the role of the structure profile for different periodicities and heights to achieve enhanced light trapping. The considered active medium of interest is 200-nm-thick hydrogenated amorphous silicon. Although the considered texture profiles possess an incremental change of refractive index from incident medium to active medium, a parabolic-shaped front side texture provides better antireflection effects owing to its high diffraction efficiencies in the higher-order modes as compared to other pattern morphologies. In the back side texture, the parabolic-shaped pattern also dominates with better light trapping efficiencies due to its ability to distribute a major amount of diffracted energy in the higher-order modes. The average reflection calculations in the wavelength range of 300-800 nm confirm that in both side textures, a periodicity of 500 nm with a height of 200 nm can be preferentially recommended for less reflection loss and improved scattering in oblique angles. The quantum efficiency calculation verifies that a device designed with these optimized parameters can offer improved efficiency for ultra-thin solar cells.

Optical display film as flexible and light trapping substrate for organic photovoltaics

We demonstrate flexible small molecular solar cells on periodically patterned plastic substrate (LCD display film) using a highly transparent poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene):poly(styrenesulfonate) (

PEDOT

PSS) electrode with flexible thin atomic layer deposited (ALD) AlO_x top and bottom encapsulation. The organic photovoltaic device (OPV) on this display film shows a power conversion efficiency of 7.48%, which is a 13.0% improvement as compared to a device fabricated on a planar poly-ethylen-terephtalate (PET) substrate (6.62%) and even higher than the efficiency of a device using planar glass substrate (7.15%). The improvement is mainly due to an enhanced harvesting of photons with wavelengths shorter than 500 nm. Moreover, the fully encapsulated device is sufficiently flexible to withstand a bending with a 10 mm radius for more than 50 cycles at ambient condition. These results indicate that the use of standard optical display films is a cheap, simple and efficient way to increase the photocurrent and overall efficiency of organic photovoltaic devices.