Broadband Enhancement in Thin-Film Amorphous Silicon Solar Cells Enabled by Nucleated Silver Nanoparticles
Broadband Enhancement in Thin-Film Amorphous Silicon Solar Cells Enabled by Nucleated Silver Nanoparticles
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DOI：
10.1021/nl203463z
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发表时间：
2012-05-01
期刊：
影响因子：
10.8
通讯作者：
Gu, Min
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Chen, Xi;Jia, Baohua;Gu, Min
最近，等离子体效应在太阳能电池研究中引起了极大的兴趣，因为它们被认为能够显着提高薄膜太阳能电池的效率。然而，尽管付出了巨大的努力，但所需的宽带增强（这对于实际设备性能的提高至关重要）尚未通过太阳能行业赞赏的简单制造和集成方法来实现。我们在本文中提出了一种新颖的想法，即使用有核银纳米粒子来有效地散射宽带波长范围内的光，以实现硅吸收层中显着的吸收增强。由于不需要关键的图案化，实验上这些定制的纳米粒子是通过简单、低成本和可升级的湿化学合成方法获得的，并集成在非晶硅薄膜太阳能电池的背接触层之前。与没有纳米颗粒的随机纹理参考电池相比，以 10% 覆盖密度掺入 200 nm 有核银纳米颗粒的太阳能电池清楚地表现出宽带吸收增强和显着的优越性能，包括短路光电流密度提高 14.3% 和能量转换效率提高 23%。在测量的等离子体太阳能电池中，最高效率达到8.1%。显着的增强主要归因于定制的有核银纳米粒子的集成所产生的宽带光散射。
Recently plasmonic effects have gained tremendous interest in solar cell research because they are deemed to be able to dramatically boost the efficiency of thin-film solar cells. However, despite of the intensive efforts, the desired broadband enhancement, which is critical for real device performance improvement, has yet been achieved with simple fabrication and integration methods appreciated by the solar industry. We propose in this paper a novel idea of using nucleated silver nanoparticles to effectively scatter light in a broadband wavelength range to realize pronounced absorption enhancement in the silicon absorbing layer. Since it does not require critical patterning, experimentally these tailored nanoparticles were achieved by the simple, low-cost and upscalable wet chemical synthesis method and integrated before the back contact layer of the amorphous silicon thin-film solar cells. The solar cells incorporated with 200 nm nucleated silver nanoparticles at 10% coverage density clearly demonstrate a broadband absorption enhancement and significant superior performance including a 14.3% enhancement in the short-circuit photocurrent density and a 23% enhancement in the energy conversion efficiency, compared with the randomly textured reference cells without nanoparticles. Among the measured plasmonic solar cells the highest efficiency achieved was 8.1%. The significant enhancement is mainly attributed to the broadband light scattering arising from the integration of the tailored nucleated silver nanoparticles.