Single Grain Boundary Modeling and Design of Microcrystalline Si Solar Cells

Materials

Chu-Hsuan Lin¹  Wen-Tzu Hsu² 

[1] Department of Opto-Electronic Engineering, National Dong Hwa University, Shoufeng, Hualien 97401, Taiwan;

关键词: microcrystalline silicon;    grain boundary;    three-terminal cell;   

DOI  :  10.3390/ma6010291

来源: mdpi

【 摘 要 】

For photovoltaic applications, microcrystalline silicon has a lot of advantages, such as the ability to absorb the near-infrared part of the solar spectrum. However, there are many dangling bonds at the grain boundary in microcrystalline Si. These dangling bonds would lead to the recombination of photo-generated carriers and decrease the conversion efficiency. Therefore, we included the grain boundary in the numerical study in order to simulate a microcrystalline Si solar cell accurately, designing new three-terminal microcrystalline Si solar cells. The 3-μm-thick three-terminal cell achieved a conversion efficiency of 10.8%, while the efficiency of a typical two-terminal cell is 9.7%. The three-terminal structure increased the J_SC but decreased the V_OC, and such phenomena are discussed. High-efficiency and low-cost Si-based thin film solar cells can now be designed based on the information provided in this paper.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© 2013 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.