Improving Efficiency of Multicrystalline Silicon and CIGS Solar Cells by Incorporating Metal Nanoparticles

Abstract

This work studies the use of gold (Au) and silver (Ag) nanoparticles in multicrystalline silicon (mc-Si) and copper-indium-gallium-diselenide (CIGS) solar cells. Au and Ag nanoparticles are deposited by spin-coating method, which is a simple and low cost process. The random distribution of nanoparticles by spin coating broadens the resonance wavelength of the transmittance. This broadening favors solar cell applications. Metal shadowing competes with light scattering in a manner that varies with nanoparticle concentration. Experimental results reveal that the mc-Si solar cells that incorporate Au nanoparticles outperform those with Ag nanoparticles. The incorporation of suitable concentration of Au and Ag nanoparticles into mc-Si solar cells increases their efficiency enhancement by 5.6% and 4.8%, respectively. Incorporating Au and Ag nanoparticles into CIGS solar cells improve their efficiency enhancement by 1.2% and 1.4%, respectively. The enhancement of the photocurrent in mc-Si solar cells is lower than that in CIGS solar cells, owing to their different light scattering behaviors and material absorption coefficients.

On quantum approach to modeling of plasmon photovoltaic effect

“…For so distant separation of nanoparticles there are unimportant also corrections induced by a regular or random distribution of metallic compounds. We have verified [50] that the collective effects including destructive interference of incident light may affect the plasmon photovoltaic effect at much larger (by several orders) densities of coverages, so these effects can be safely neglected in the presented here simulation. The thickness of the Si substrate and the width of the computational cell were set 400 nm, where the thickness of the air domain was assumed 300 nm.…”

“…The efficiency gain in plasmon mediated photo-effect reaches even 200 − 300% increase beyond the ordinary photo-effect [30,36]. It contributes to an overall gain of a solar cell efficiency in much modest way because other process contribute and the plasmon mediated photo-effect is only the initial stage of the series of furthers steps-6 percent eventual increase has been demonstrated in conventional Si-multi-crystalline cell [9].…”

“…Even though an enhancement of the photo-current in a laboratory photodiode setup reaches 100% increase, the overall gain in realistic solar cells is much more modest because the photo-effect aided by plasmons is only one element of a long series of factors deciding on the final efficiency of a cell. Recently, an efficiency increase up to several percent has been observed in multi-crystalline silicon cells covered with not densely distributed gold or silver nanoparticles with radius of several tens of nanometers [9]. It must be emphasized that such an increase is very promising in view of other photovoltaic technology, like thin film solar cells, organic plastic cells or newly developed perovskite cells, where an increase even by a few percent would be important to obtain industrially competitive cell designs [4,7,[10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18].…”

Plasmonic Enhancement of Solar Cells Efficiency: Material Dependence in Semiconductor Metallic Surface Nano-Modification

“…Note also that some additional effects like reflection of the incident photons or destructive interference on metallic net would contribute and it was phenomenologically accounted in the plasmonmediated channel by an experiment-fitted factor β. The collective interference type corrections are rather not strong for the considered low densities of metallic coverings of order of 10 8 =cm 2 , and nanosphere sizes well lower than the resonant wavelength, though for larger concentrations and larger nanosphere sizes, would play a stronger reducing role (reflecting photons) [6,19]. The resonance threshold was accounted for the damped resonance envelope function in Eq.…”

Self-Organized Structuring of the Surface of a Metal–Semiconductor Composite by Femtosecond Laser Processing

“…Recently, the incorporation of metal nanostructures into thin-film SCs was considered as one of the ways of their improvement. The effectiveness of such structures is mainly explained by the plasmon effect that improves the light propagation, absorption and scattering in such photovoltaic cells [1][2][3][4][5]. Thus, the authors of [6] theoretically demonstrate that the existence of the direct absorption mechanism due to surface plasmons on metal nanoparticles (NPs) is an argument for placing the nanoparticles inside the silicon, rather than in front of, or at the rear of the cell.…”