We report the realization of both excellent optical and electrical properties of nanostructured multicrystalline silicon solar cells by a simple and industrially compatible technique of surface morphology modification. The nanostructures are prepared by Ag-catalyzed chemical etching and subsequent NaOH treatment with controllable geometrical parameters and surface area enhancement ratio. We have examined in detail the influence of different surface area enhancement ratios on reflectance, carrier recombination characteristics and cell performance. By conducting a quantitative analysis of these factors, we have successfully demonstrated a higher-than-traditional output performance of nanostructured multicrystalline silicon solar cells with a low average reflectance of 4.93%, a low effective surface recombination velocity of 6.59 m s(-1), and a certified conversion efficiency of 17.75% on large size (156 × 156 mm(2)) silicon cells, which is ∼0.3% higher than the acid textured counterparts. The present work opens a potential prospect for the mass production of nanostructured solar cells with improved efficiencies.

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Based on a traditional acid etch system (i.e., HNO3/HF), a complex texture comprising microscale and submicroscale structures was produced on the surface of a diamond‐wire‐sawn (DWS) multicrystalline Si (mc‐Si) wafer, upon whose surface it is typically difficult to form an effective texture for suppressing the reflection of incident light. Immersing the as‐cut wafer into an HF/HNO3/AgNO3 solution introduced a large number of artificial defects onto the wafer surface. A subsequent HNO3/HF etch induced a micron texture expanded from the original DWS‐induced damage as well as a submicron texture converted from the artificial defects. The multiscale textured DWS exhibited a reflectivity of ~19%, which is much lower than the reflectivity after only an HNO3/HF etch (~28%). Therefore, the solar cell performance was improved owing primarily to improved optical antireflection and surface passivation. The method is simple and can be easily scaled up into the in‐line texture process.

In this paper, we demonstrate that the performance of the industrial multicrystalline silicon solar cells can be improved by embedding the silver nanoparticles (Ag-NPs) into the SiNx layer. On the one hand, the cells have a certain optical loss in short wavelengths near the plasmonic resonance frequency of Ag-NPs, but their open circuit voltages and filling factors are increased due to depressed surface recombination as those short wavelength photons are mainly absorbed by Ag-NPs instead of the surface; on the other hand, the cells show strong absorption in long wavelengths, which can be attributed to the forward-scattering effect of Ag-NPs. Taking together, UV-absorbing Ag-NPs may act as a “sunscreen” to shield the UV damage, while improve the cell efficiency from 18.05 % to 18.25 % by embedding proper Ag-NPs. The techniques presented in this work can be easily incorporated into the current mc-Si solar cell production line, thus have great potential for the mass practical application.