Light Harvesting in Silicon Nanowires Solar Cells by Using Graphene Layer and Plasmonic Nanoparticles

Abstract

In this work, a silicon nanowire solar cell for efficient light harvesting in the visible and near-infrared regions is introduced. In this structure, the silicon nanowires (SiNWs) are coated with a graphene layer and plasmonic nanoparticles are distributed on the top surface of the silicon substrate layer. The proposed structure is simulated using the finite difference time domain (FDTD) method to determine the performance of the solar cell by calculating the open-circuit voltage, fill factor, short-circuit current density, and power conversion efficiency. The absorbed light energy is compared for different nanoparticle materials, namely Au, Ag, Al, and Cu, and Au NPs give the best performance. Different values of the radius of the Au NP are simulated, namely 30, 40, 50, and 60 nm, to determine the optimum radius, and the effect of excess carrier concentration on the solar cell performance is also tested. The obtained open-circuit voltage is 0.63 V, fill factor is 0.73, short-circuit current density is 41.7 mA/cm2, and power conversion efficiency is 19.0%. The proposed SiNW solar cell improves the overall efficiency by almost 60%. Furthermore, the effects of the NW length and distance between NWs are also studied in this work. Finally, the distribution of the optical power in different layers along the solar cell and for different solar cell structures is also illustrated in this paper.

Investigating the Absorption Spectra of a Plasmonic Metamaterial Absorber Based on Disc-in-Hole Nanometallic Structure

“…The most important step in this fabrication process is to make the sidewalls of the ring-shaped pillars vertical to guarantee that no metals were deposited on the sidewalls during evaporation [ 34 ]. Table 1 compares the proposed plasmonic metamaterial absorber to structures documented in the literature, fabricated structures, and simulated work [ 26 , 36 , 38 ]. Regarding the reported absorber in this paper, it is very competitive due to its higher absorption and relative absorption bandwidth.…”

Optical and electrical characterization of solar cell with nanowires mimicking antireflection coating layers considering axial and radial PN junctions

“…The fabrication process needed here has been reported for both Silicon 31 and Ge 51 solar cells and we expect that this concept can be used in PVSC using other semiconductor materials for multijunctions, such as Si with GaAs or perovskite tandem solar cells. Similarly, this concept can be applied to other innovative approaches, such as using a thin graphene layer to increase absorption further 63 or energy downshifting to absorb more solar energy from a wider solar spectrum. 64 We believe that the performance of these designs can be further enhanced by using even a much thinner layer by adopting the concept of mimicking multiple ARC layers presented here by using NWs of different diameters while reducing material waste and costs.…”

Analyzing the Mechanism of Zinc Oxide Nanowires Bending and Bundling Induced by Electron Beam under Scanning Electron Microscope Using Numerical and Simulation Analysis

“…Plasmonic nanoparticles distributed on the (ZnO) layer is changing the absorbed optical power inside, which depends on the maximum value of reflectivity. (NP) shape is the main parameter on the transmitted optical power, as well as the relative permittivity of the plasmonic (NPs) and dielectric constant of the surrounded medium [ 25 ]. The maximum absorption occurred at the maximum value of the wavelength, which can be calculated using Equation (7).…”

“…Hence, the dielectric permittivity can be expressed by using a multi-oscillator Drude–Lorentz model [ 25 ], as given in Equation (8): where ( ε ∞ ) is the plasmonic high frequency dielectric permittivity, ( ω D ) and ( γ D ) are the plasma and collision frequencies of the free electrons, ( δ k ) is the amplitude of Lorentz oscillator, ( ω k ) is the resonance angular frequencies and ( γ k ) is the damping constants for ( k ) value from one to six.…”

“…(Au NPs) behave like a nanoantenna, which absorb the incident light and retransmit it into the structure, where peak wavelength of the absorbed light is depending on the (Au NPs) size and periodicity as given in Equation (7). Changing the plasmonic material will change the peak maximum wavelength to different range according to the Drude–Lorentz model [ 25 ]. For (Au NPs), the maximum peak occurs at 400 nm in addition to other shifted peaks, according to the (Au NPs) radius as illustrated in Figure 10 .…”