Efficiency of the a-Si:H solar cell and grain size of SnO₂transparent conductive film

Abstract

The relationship between average grain size on the surface of SnO 2 transparent conductive film and conversion efficiency of the a-Si:H solar cell was investigated. a-Si:H solar cells were fabricated on SnO2/glass substrates with various grain sizes.The cell structure was glass/p(SiC)-i-n/Al and the effective cell area was 4 x 10 -2cm2. The reflectivity from the glass substrate was reduced to about 7 percent with increasing the grain size from 0.1 to 0.8fim. and the short-circuit current was inceased from 12 to 14mA/cm2. A 7.9 percent of conversion efficiency was achieved using milky S n 0 2 film of 0 . 4 -~m average grain size at AM-lOOrnWicm2.T

Plasma Textured Glass Surface Morphologies for Amorphous Silicon Thin Film Solar Cells-A review

“…Figure 1 shows various light trapping surface morphologies for the TCO films. Figure 1(a) and 1(b) represents textured TCO surface morphologies of SnO 2 :F and ZnO:B films being employed by the Ashai-U research group [46,[56][57][58][59][60][61]. The ZnO:B films were grown by low pressure CVD (LP-CVD) from precursors of diethyl-zinc and H 2 O; the conductivity was easily controlled by using di-borane as the dopant source [58,59] [1,6,7].…”

Amorphous Silicon–Based Solar Cells

“…In pin superstrate cells deposited on glass, the glass substrate is first coated with a textured transparent conducting oxide, usually SnO 2 or ZnO, using one of the several methods such as atmospheric pressure chemical vapor deposition (APCVD) [167,168]. A pin top cell having an a-Si i-layer is then deposited, followed by the a-SiGe middle cell, and finally the narrow band gap a-SiGe bottom cell.…”

Understanding of photocurrent enhancement in real thin film solar cells: towards optimal one-dimensional gratings

“…Much effort has been devoted to the trapping of light in the cell through periodic [1][2][3][4] and random interface textures [5][6][7], resulting in an effective prolongation of the absorption length. Assuming Lambertian scattering at the interfaces of a low absorbing thin film semiconductor, Yablonovitch suggested an upper limit of the light path enhancement equal to 4n 2 , where n is the refractive index of the absorber film [8]; in the experiment, this limit has not yet been reached.…”