Modeling and Simulation of Dual Gratings based Ultrathin Amorphous Silicon Solar Cells

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Mechanics, Materials Science & Engineering, April 2017 – ISSN 2412-5954

Modeling and Simulation of Dual Gratings based Ultrathin Amorphous Silicon Solar Cells49 S. Saravanan1,a, R.S. Dubey1, S. Kalainathan2 1 – Advanced Research Laboratory for Nanomaterials and Devices, Department of Nanotechnology, Swarnandhra College of Engineering and Technology, Seetharampuram, Narsapur (A.P.), India 2 – School of Advanced Sciences, VIT University, Vellore, (T.N.), India a – rag_pcw@yahoo.co.in DOI 10.2412/mmse.45.64.871 provided by Seo4U.link

Keywords: solar cell, RCWA method, dual gratings, plasmonic, photonic modes, Fabry-Perot resonance.

ABSTRACT. We present the modeling and simulation of a 50 nm ultrathin amorphous silicon solar cell using RCWA method. Optimized solar cell design showed enhanced cell efficiency up to 16.02 and 15.2% for the TE and TM polarization cases. An enhancement in optical performance is found that is associated with efficient light trapping design. The proposed design is observed to be supported with photonic and plasmonic modes. We have also explored the field distribution within the solar device with Fabry-Perot (FP) resonance and surface plasmon polariton (SPP) modes.

Introduction. Nowadays, there is a trend of making silicon solar cellsby employing thin absorption layer in order to reduce the fabrication cost. But this absorber layer is inefficient for the absorption of high wavelength light [1].According to the literature, the penetration depth of the photons in 180µm thick silicon solar cell was observed to be 3mm within the wavelength range 900-1100 nm. Therefore, the challenging issue is to design an efficient light trapping structure which can reuse the unabsorbed light coming after crossing the thin active region. Among various light trapping schemes, grating based design is found to be promising for the photons trapping. However, the metal and dielectric gratings at the bottom and top respectively are demanded for the better harvesting of light [2]. Ge et al. have proposed a solar cell design based on metallic gratingswithone-dimensional (1D) photonic crystaland observed an enhancement in the optical path length. They have obtained a wide range of optical absorption for both TE and TM polarization modes using rigorous coupled wave analysis (RCWA) method.The designed hybrid solar cell showed enhancement in photon absorption over the entire spectral region irrespective to the angle of incidence[3].Mutitu et al.havepresented a design and fabrication of hybrid dielectric-metallic back reflectors for amorphous silicon solar cells and reported the enhanced reflectance with the use of more distributed Bragg layer (DBR) pairs. This proposed idea of solar cell design has explored the experimental realization of thin filma-Si solar cells using hybrid dielectric-metallic back surface reflector[4].Abass et al. have numerically studied the complex dual-interface grating systems (plasmonic Ag grating at the bottom and dielectric ITO gratings at the top)to enhance light absorption in silicon thin film solar cells. The proposed grating could felicitate the effect of both plasmonic and photonic modes[5].Theuring et al.have presented the design and fabrication of plasmonic and photonic light trapping structure by using metallic (Ag) and non-metallic (SiO2) nanoparticle respectively. The solar cell integrated with SiO2 nanoparticles could give good result as comparison to the solar cell based on Ag nanoparticles [6]. In this paper, we propose a design of an ultrathin amorphous silicon solar cell which is integrated with a thin ITO (top) and Ag (bottom) gratings for the light trapping. In Section second designing 49

© 2017 The Authors. Published by Magnolithe GmbH. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

MMSE Journal. Open Access www.mmse.xyz 217


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