Zhang Yinan, Stokes Nicholas, Jia Baohua, Fan Shanhui, Gu Min
Centre for Micro-Photonics, Faculty of Science, Engineering and Technology, Swinburne University of Technology, Hawthorn, Victoria 3122, Australia.
Department of Electrical Engineering, Ginzton Laboratory, Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305, United States.
Sci Rep. 2014 May 13;4:4939. doi: 10.1038/srep04939.
The cost-effectiveness of market-dominating silicon wafer solar cells plays a key role in determining the competiveness of solar energy with other exhaustible energy sources. Reducing the silicon wafer thickness at a minimized efficiency loss represents a mainstream trend in increasing the cost-effectiveness of wafer-based solar cells. In this paper we demonstrate that, using the advanced light trapping strategy with a properly designed nanoparticle architecture, the wafer thickness can be dramatically reduced to only around 1/10 of the current thickness (180 μm) without any solar cell efficiency loss at 18.2%. Nanoparticle integrated ultra-thin solar cells with only 3% of the current wafer thickness can potentially achieve 15.3% efficiency combining the absorption enhancement with the benefit of thinner wafer induced open circuit voltage increase. This represents a 97% material saving with only 15% relative efficiency loss. These results demonstrate the feasibility and prospect of achieving high-efficiency ultra-thin silicon wafer cells with plasmonic light trapping.
占据市场主导地位的硅片太阳能电池的成本效益在决定太阳能与其他不可再生能源的竞争力方面起着关键作用。在将效率损失降至最低的情况下减小硅片厚度是提高基于硅片的太阳能电池成本效益的主流趋势。在本文中，我们证明，通过采用具有适当设计的纳米颗粒结构的先进光捕获策略，硅片厚度可以大幅降低至仅为当前厚度（180μm）的约1/10，而太阳能电池效率在18.2%时不会有任何损失。仅为当前硅片厚度3%的集成纳米颗粒超薄太阳能电池，结合吸收增强和更薄硅片带来的开路电压增加的优势，有可能实现15.3%的效率。这意味着在相对效率仅损失15%的情况下节省了97%的材料。这些结果证明了利用等离子体光捕获实现高效超薄硅片电池的可行性和前景。
