Light trapping in thin-film solar cell to enhance the absorption efficiency using FDTD simulation
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RESEARCH ARTICLE
Light trapping in thin-film solar cell to enhance the absorption efficiency using FDTD simulation Abu S. M. Mohsin1 Maliha Islam1
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Monica Mobashera1 • Afrida Malik1 • Maisha Rubaiat1
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Received: 21 April 2020 / Accepted: 16 September 2020 Ó The Optical Society of India 2020
Abstract Recently, plasmonics has been used to trap the light at nanoscale to improve the absorption in solar cells. In this study, we construct a silicon thin-film solar cell (TFSC) using finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) simulation. The TFSC solar cell was designed with TiO2 antireflection layer, aluminum (Al) as a reflective layer, and silicon (Si) as a absorption layer. The silver nanoparticles of 50 nm diameter and 400 nm separation are embedded on absorption layer. Optimizing the location of nanoparticle, light scattering efficiency and near-filled light concentration has been harnessed. The reflective Al layer reflect the light towards upper layer and increases the overall absorption. The proposed structure allows the sunlight to enter into the absorption layer at all directions, breaking the molecular bonding and releasing electrons. We determined the short-circuit current, fill factor, opencircuit voltage, absorption efficiency, and conversion efficiency of our proposed model. The simulation results reveals that, TFSC with embedded nanoparticle array, antireflection coating and reflective layer has higher shortcircuit current of 23.98 mA/cm2, higher fill-factor of 0.84 and an efficiency of 12.3%.The proposed TFSC solar cell increases the absorption efficiency by 43.5% and conversion efficiency by 64.66% compared with conventional TFSC. The findings will be helpful to design more efficient and cost effective solar cell utilizing light-trapping mechanism of plasmonic nanoparticle of different size, shape, and geometry.
& Abu S. M. Mohsin [email protected] 1
Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Nanotechnology, IoT and Machine Learning Research Group, Brac University, Dhaka 1212, Bangladesh
Keywords Light trapping Silver nanoparticle array Short-circuit current Fill factor Absorption efficiency and Thin-film solar cell
Introduction The word is facing a critical situation to meet up the energy demand of growing population. Therefore, there is a need of finding alternative sources of energy which are environmentally friendly, renewable, and economical. Over last few decades, handful of such alternatives have been developed; however, none is as promising as solar energy. When a light strikes on a solar cell, it converts sunlight into electricity-producing electric power. For photovoltaic energy conversion, semiconductors are used in the form of p–n junction [1]. To increase the efficiency of solar cell several research has been conducted on thin-film [2], organic [3], plasmonic [4–7], dye-sensitized [8–11], and photonic crystals [12, 13]. It is known from the analytical analysis that the maximum theoretical efficiency of single-junction solar cell is 33.16% [14]. However, for an infinit
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