Fahim Narges F, Jia Baohua, Shi Zhengrong, Gu Min
Centre for Micro-Photonics, Faculty of Engineering and Industrial Sciences, Swinburne University of Technology, Hawthorn, 3122 Victoria, Australia
Opt Express. 2012 Sep 10;20 Suppl 5:A694-705. doi: 10.1364/OE.20.00A694.
Crystalline silicon solar cells are predominant and occupying more than 89% of the global solar photovoltaic market. Despite the boom of the innovative solar technologies, few can provide a low-cost radical solution to dramatically boost the efficiency of crystalline silicon solar cells, which has reached plateau in the past ten years. Here, we present a novel strategy to simultaneously achieve dramatic enhancement in the short-circuit current and the fill factor through the integration of Ag plasmonic nanoparticles and nanoshells on the antireflection coating and the screen-printed fingers of monocrystalline silicon solar cells, respectively, by a single step and scalable modified electroless displacement method. As a consequence, up to 35.2% enhancement in the energy conversion efficiency has been achieved due to the plasmonic broadband light trapping and the significant reduction in the series resistance. More importantly, this method can further increase the efficiency of the best performing textured solar cells from 18.3% to 19.2%, producing the highest efficiency cells exceeding the state-of-the-art efficiency of the standard screen-printed solar cells. The dual functions of the Ag nanostructures, reported for the first time here, present a clear contrast to the previous works, where plasmonic nanostructures were integrated into solar cells to achieve the short-circuit current enhancement predominately. Our method offers a facile, cost-effective and scalable pathway for metallic nanostructures to be used to dramatically boost the overall efficiency of the optically thick crystalline silicon solar cells.
晶体硅太阳能电池占主导地位，占据全球太阳能光伏市场的89%以上。尽管创新太阳能技术蓬勃发展，但很少有技术能提供低成本的根本解决方案来大幅提高晶体硅太阳能电池的效率，而该效率在过去十年已达到平台期。在此，我们提出一种新颖策略，通过分别在单晶硅太阳能电池的抗反射涂层和丝网印刷指状电极上集成银等离子体纳米颗粒和纳米壳，采用单步且可扩展的改进化学置换法，同时实现短路电流和填充因子的显著提高。结果，由于等离子体宽带光捕获和串联电阻的显著降低，能量转换效率提高了35.2%。更重要的是，该方法能将性能最佳的纹理太阳能电池的效率从18.3%进一步提高到19.2%，制造出效率最高的电池，超过了标准丝网印刷太阳能电池的现有技术效率。本文首次报道的银纳米结构的双重功能，与之前的工作形成鲜明对比，之前是将等离子体纳米结构集成到太阳能电池中主要实现短路电流的提高。我们的方法为金属纳米结构用于大幅提高光学厚度较大的晶体硅太阳能电池的整体效率提供了一种简便、经济高效且可扩展的途径。
