Improving thin-film crystalline silicon solar cell efficiencies with photonic crystals.
By Peter Bermel, C. Luo, L. Zeng, Lionel C. Kimerling, John D. Joannopoulos. Optics Express, 2007
670 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Most photovoltaic (solar) cells are made from crystalline silicon (c-Si), which has an indirect band gap. This gives rise to weak absorption of one-third of usable solar photons. Therefore, improved light trapping schemes are needed, particularly for c-Si thin film solar cells. Here, a photonic crystal-based light-trapping approach is analyzed and compared to previous approaches. For a solar cell made of a 2 mum thin film of c-Si and a 6 bilayer distributed Bragg reflector (DBR) in the back, power generation can be enhanced by a relative amount of 24.0% by adding a 1D grating, 26.3% by replacing the DBR with a six-period triangular photonic crystal made of air holes in silicon, 31.3% by a DBR plus 2D grating, and 26.5% by replacing it with an eight-period inverse opal photonic crystal.
Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Surfaces, Coatings and Films
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a8c820533ef3b920d7f17ece0ff1dbf2da00f95f
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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics
In Electrical and Electronic Engineering
Citations in the corpus
- Radiative sky cooling: fundamental physics, materials, structures, and applications (2017, positive): “Nanophotonics opens up new possibilities to tailor the emittance spectrum via properly designing periodic nano/ micro-structures, in analogy with prior efforts in photovoltaics [72] and TPV [73, 74].”