2-D Photonic Crystal-Based Solar Cell
Light trapping inside a solar cell is a very important parameter needed to be studied at the time of its designing. All conventional silicon solar cells which are currently in use have low light trapping, in turn providing low efficiency. In this paper, n
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Abstract Light trapping inside a solar cell is a very important parameter needed to be studied at the time of its designing. All conventional silicon solar cells which are currently in use have low light trapping, in turn providing low efficiency. In this paper, null radius defects are introduced in photonic crystals to improve the light trapping capacity of the solar cell. The paper deals with design of photonic crystals with null radius defect and its use in solar cell to increase its efficiency. In this proposed research work, power spectrum of solar cell has been studied and absorptions of photonic crystal-based solar cell and conventional silicon solar cell are compared at different input wavelengths. Keywords Photonic crystal trapping Absorption
Solar cell Null radius defect Silicon Light
1 Introduction Today, there is a need to replace non-renewable sources of energy. Solar energy is a vast source of energy. It, in fact, has the potential to replace conventional source of energy to mankind. The energy delivered by the Sun in 1 h is enough to be used by people in a whole year. Current solar cell systems operate at less than 30 % power conversion efficiency, but the theoretical limit is greater than 86 % [1]. The reason for limited efficiency is the fact that all the photons do not generate electron–hole pair. The first reason behind this is the refractive index contrast of air and solar cell material; some photons are reflected. The second reason is its low absorption Mehra Rekha (&) Mahnot Neha Maheshwary Shikha Government Engineering College, Ajmer, India e-mail: [email protected] Mahnot Neha e-mail: [email protected] Maheshwary Shikha e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Science+Business Media Singapore 2016 S.C. Satapathy et al. (eds.), Proceedings of the International Congress on Information and Communication Technology, Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing 438, DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-0767-5_8
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coefficient, i.e. all the photons do not get absorbed and leave the solar cell system. The third reason is that system itself emits radiation. So it is needed to assure that photons enter the solar cell device or it should prevent photons from leaving. These purposes can be termed as ‘light trapping’. Light trapping in a solar cell allows either to increase its efficiency by enlarging the number of used photons, or it allows decreasing the solar cell’s thickness which is the basic requirement of thin film solar cell. 1-D and 2-D photonic crystals are the centre of attraction for researchers these days. 1-D photonic crystal (i.e. grating) can be used to reduce reflection as anti-reflective coating [2] or can be used as back reflector. 2-D photonic crystal can also be used as back reflector [3]. Double-layer anti-reflective coating is also used to reduce reflection. Materials such as SiO2, Si3N4 and TiO2 can be used as ARC [4]. Different photonic crystal arrangements can also be used to trap light, i.e. to increase absorption inside the solar cell. To in
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