Enhancement of nano-/microtextured crystalline silicon solar cells efficiency using hydrogen plasma surface treatment

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• 作者：Mohsen Asad ; ^{mohsenasad@shirazu.ac.ir" class="auth_mail" title="E-mail the corresponding author} ; Mohammadreza Kowsari ; Mohammad Hossein Sheikhi
• 关键词：Silicon solar cells ; Nano-/microtexture ; Reflection ; Efficiency ; Hydrogen plasma
• 刊名：Optik - International Journal for Light and Electron Optics
• 出版年：2015
• 出版时间：December 2015
• 年：2015
• 卷：126
• 期：24
• 页码：5762-5766
• 全文大小：2047 K

文摘

Surface engineering on crystalline silicon (c-Si) solar cells has attracted great attention due to the fact that increasing the trapping of photons on one hand, and electron–hole recombination on the other hand, have compromising effects on the device performance. This study presents fabrication of nanotextures using metal assisted etching (MAE), incorporating silver (Ag) nanoparticles (NPs) on the conventional micro textures. Effect of the process temperature on final hierarchical structure of nanotextures was also investigated. A very fine nanotextured silicon surface was achieved which is almost capable of 98% light trapping in the visible spectral range after complete hierarchical surface passivation (surface hydrogenation and SiN_x:H antireflection coating deposition). Effect of Plasma Hydrogen passivation on the surface prior to the silicon nitride (SiN_x:H) deposition was investigated as an effective process to decrease the recombination velocity on the front surface. An increase in the lifetime from 98 μs to 127 μs for nano-/microtextured solar cells was observed after surface hydrogenation. An efficiency of 18.24% was measured for the completely processed cells. Compared to similar microtextured reference cells, 23% increase in short-circuit current density (J_sc), 4% enhancement in open circuit voltage (V_oc) and 1.34% improvement in efficiency was observed.