Crystalline silicon thin-film solar cells on ceramic substrates

Rehman, Atteq Ur; Lee, Sangeun; Lee, Soo Hong

doi:10.1007/s13391-014-4254-8

Cited by 8 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 31 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Ultra-thin c-Si solar cells (having absorber layer of sub-10 μ m) offer versatile benefit for energy harvesting. This technology has the potential to provide better stability and higher efficiency at low cost 1 , 2 . Through layer transferring, ultra-thin c-Si photovoltaics (PV) provides a path towards shrinking the material consumption cost by allowing multiple utilization of the substrate 3 , which currently accounts for 40% of the module cost 4 .…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Limitation of Optical Enhancement in Ultra-thin Solar Cells Imposed by Contact Selectivity

Islam

Saraswat

2018

Sci Rep

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Ultra-thin crystalline silicon (c-Si) solar cell suffers both from poor light absorption and minority carrier recombination at the contacts resulting in low contact selectivity. Yet most of the research focuses on improving the light absorption by introducing novel light trapping technique. Our work shows that for ultra-thin absorber, the benefit of optical enhancement is limited by low contact selectivity. Using simulation we observe that performance enhancement from light trapping starts to saturate as the absorber scales down because of the increase in probability of the photo-generated carriers to recombine at the metal contact. Therefore, improving the carrier selectivity of the contacts, which reduces the recombination at contacts, is important to improve the performance of the solar cell beyond what is possible by enhancing light absorption only. The impact of improving contact selectivity increases as the absorber thickness scales below 20 micrometer (μm). Light trapping provides better light management and improving contact selectivity provides better photo-generated carrier management. When better light management increases the number of photo-generated carriers, better carrier management is a useful optimization knob to achieve the efficiency close to the thermodynamic limit. Our work explores a design trade-off in detail which is often overlooked by the research community.

show abstract

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Limitation of Optical Enhancement in Ultra-thin Solar Cells Imposed by Contact Selectivity

Islam

Saraswat

2018

Sci Rep

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Moreover, changes in doping levels during growth may also be caused by the cooling process. [106] When considering the epitaxy from a gas precursor, hightemperature approaches (between 800 and 1200 °C), such as chemical vapor deposition (CVD) [108,109] (see Figure 12a), are commonly used because thermal activation helps incoming Si atoms to settle in crystalline sites. However, high-temperature methods face a number of challenges, including high thermal budget, dopant diffusion, thermal mismatch, and incompatibility with lowcost substrates.…”

Section: "Bottom-up" Approachesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Based on the melt‐assisted epitaxial growth (see Figure a), wafer equivalent techniques such as string ribbon growth have been studied, [ 101–103 ] where the central part of the ribbon produces a large number of dislocations (see Figure 11b) [ 104 ] and twin boundaries. [ 101 ] In addition, there are methods based on liquid‐phase epitaxy (LPE) [ 105,106 ] as shown in Figure 11c, such as the epi‐lift technique, which can grow a Si epitaxial layer on a c‐Si substrate with partial mask. [ 107 ] LPE growth rates range from a few microns/hour to tens of microns/hour and substrate temperatures range from 800 to 1000 °C.…”

Section: “Bottom‐up” Approachesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Fabrication of Crystalline Si Thin Films for Photovoltaics

Shen

Cabarrocas

et al. 2022

Physica Rapid Research Ltrs

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Crystalline Si (c‐Si) thin films have been widely studied for their application to solar cells and flexible electronics. However, their application at large scale is limited by their fabrication process. As reviewed in this paper, many approaches have been studied, but only some of them have been made into large‐scale industrial production. The standard wire sawing of Si ingots cannot be scaled down to produce thin c‐Si wafers and films due to the brittle nature of c‐Si material, the resulting significant thickness variations, and the waste of material. Therefore, techniques based on the kerf‐less processes including “top‐down” and “bottom‐up” approaches have been developed in recent decades. In this review, photovoltaic applications of thin c‐Si wafers with thicknesses ranging from 50 μm down to 1 μm are presented first. Then, methods to fabricate c‐Si thin films based on both approaches are detailed, including slim‐cut, “smart‐cut,” epi‐free, as well as various growth processes such as molecular beam epitaxy, liquid phase epitaxy, ion beam, and chemical vapor deposition processes at a wide range of growth temperatures, from 1000 °C down to 150 °C. The advantages and disadvantages of these methods are presented and compared.

show abstract

Poly-crystalline thin-film by aluminum induced crystallization on aluminum nitride substrate

Bhopal

Lee

2016

Electron. Mater. Lett.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Crystalline silicon thin-film solar cells on ceramic substrates

Cited by 8 publications

References 31 publications

Limitation of Optical Enhancement in Ultra-thin Solar Cells Imposed by Contact Selectivity

Limitation of Optical Enhancement in Ultra-thin Solar Cells Imposed by Contact Selectivity

Fabrication of Crystalline Si Thin Films for Photovoltaics

Poly-crystalline thin-film by aluminum induced crystallization on aluminum nitride substrate

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About