A novel way of texturing glass for microcrystalline silicon thin film solar cells application

Abstract

In this paper, we present a novel way of texturing glass facilitated by ZnO:Al thin film as sacrificial layer for thin film silicon solar cell application. We name this technique zinc oxide-induced texturing (ZIT). The texturing of glass was achieved by wet etching of ZnO:Al covered glass with HF and HNO 3 as etchants. We investigated the influence of the ZnO:Al layer sputtering condition, the layer thickness, and the etchant composition on the surface morphology of the textured glass. We demonstrate that we are able to control the roughness of the ZIT glass over a wide roughness range, ranging from 20 to 400 nm. Highly efficient microcrystalline silicon n-i-p solar cells were deposited on ZIT glass. The influence of the substrate morphology on the solar cell performance is also discussed. The highest efficiency for a single junction n-i-p microcrystalline silicon solar cell obtained in this work is 10.64% (Active area).

Tuning the properties of F:SnO2 (FTO) nanocomposites with S:TiO2 nanoparticles – promising hazy transparent electrodes for photovoltaics applications

“…Alternatively, using techniques enabling uniform and conformal deposition of TCO films, the optical texture of TCOs can be defined by patterning glass substrates using chemical/physical etching, nano-imprinting etc. [6][7][8][9] These processes can nevertheless become complicated to handle due to the large number of steps involved, while the masters used for nano-imprinting can be expensive. New simple and cheap strategies to control the texture of TCOs are thus being pursued.…”

Electrochemical Oxidation of Organic Pollutants Powered by a Silicon-Based Solar Cell

“…The a-Si:H/nc-Si:H solar cells were deposited in wet-etched textured corning glass with aluminum-doped zinc oxide (AZO) as TCO. The texturing of the glass used for the a-Si:H/nc-Si:H cell is described elsewhere . Nanocrystalline silicon oxide (nc-SiO x :H) was used as p-layer (boron doped) and n-layer (phosphorous doped).…”

Colored optic filters on c‐Si IBC solar cells for building integrated photovoltaic applications

“…These patterns can be produced via wet etching, as shown by previous studies. [61][62][63][64] On section (c) of Table 8, we present the effect produced by the texturing on the perceived color of the cell. For the case of the brown cell, neither the hue nor the saturation can be restored.…”

“…The average crater depth on the sample was found to be of 0.7 μm. For more information, please refer to [61][62][63][64]…”