Typical thin-film photovoltaic cells incorporate a textured transparent conductive oxide to efficiently harvest solar energy. What should be the ideally desired morphology of this textured surface for best cell performance -is highly debated but remains an unsolved mystery. We present a comprehensive methodology to 1) accurately model, 2) extract macroscopically sufficient statistical finger-prints and 3) predict best desired values for these statistical finger-prints of such a randomly textured surface for the best performance of the cell.
Abstract-In this letter, we investigate the nature of shunt leakage currents in large-area (on the order of square centimeters) thin-film a-Si:H p-i-n solar cells and show that it is characterized by following universal features: 1) voltage symmetry; 2) power-law voltage dependence; and 3) weak temperature dependence. The voltage symmetry offers a robust empirical method to isolate the diode current from measured "shunt-contaminated" forward dark IV . We find that space-charge-limited current provides the best qualitative explanation for the observed features of the shunt current. Finally, we discuss the possible physical origin of localized shunt paths in the light of experimental observations from literature.
This work analyzes the impact of resistive and recombination losses in Metal Wrap Through (MWT) solar cells through TCAD numerical simulations. Two types of MWT architectures are considered in this work: "point busbar" featuring one circular tabbing contact for each via at the back side and "continuous busbar" in which the rear busbar connects all the vias along a line. A comparison with conventional, Hpattern, Front Contact (FC) solar cells is performed by adopting the surface recombination velocity at the rear contact isolation region as a parameter representative of possible passivation options. The differences in dark and light conditions are highlighted. Moreover, the following resistive losses in MWT cells are investigated: via resistance, shunting effect, lateral conduction of charge carriers above rear busbar. An analytical model to account for the lateral conduction of charge carriers is proposed and validated by means of numerical simulations. While the advantage of MWT over FC cells is confirmed by simulation, we quantitatively show how the resistive and recombination losses limit the efficiency of MWT cells.
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