Optimization of random diffraction gratings in thin-film solar cells using genetic algorithms

Lin, Albert; Phillips, Jamie

doi:10.1016/j.solmat.2008.07.021

Cited by 104 publications

(57 citation statements)

References 27 publications

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“…The benefit of a certain amount of disorder in periodic light-trapping structures was repeatedly confirmed in the past [43,91,110,111], but some practical guidelines were given by Han and Chen [93], which were based on arguments of group theory as described in the following. Engineering light-trapping structures in terms of their impact on the optical phase thus can be understood as a general principle for enhancing the absorption of thin-films.…”

Section: Phase Engineeringmentioning

confidence: 95%

Diffractive Optics for Thin-Film Silicon Solar Cells

Schuster¹

2017

Springer Theses

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Thin-film silicon solar cells have the potential to convert sunlight into electricity at high efficiency, low cost and without generating pollutants. However, they need to become more competitive with conventional energy technologies by increasing their efficiency.One of the key efficiency limitations of using thin silicon absorber materials relates to the optical loss of low-energy photons, because the absorption coefficient of silicon decreases strongly for these low-energy photons in the red and nearinfrared, such that the absorption length becomes longer than the absorber layer thickness. If, in contrast, the incident light was redirected and trapped into the plane of the silicon slab, a thin-film could absorb as much light as a thick layer.Diffractive textures can not only efficiently scatter the low-energy photons, but are also able to suppress the reflection of the incident sunlight. In order to take advantage of the full benefits that textures can offer, I outline a simple layer transfer technique that allows the structuring of a thin-film independently from both sides, and use absorption measurements to show that structuring on both sides is favourable compared to structuring on one side only. I also introduce a figure-of-merit that can objectively and quantitatively assess the benefit of the structuring itself, which allows me to benchmark state-ofthe-art proposals and to deduce some important design rules. Minimising the parasitic losses, for example, is of critical importance, as the desired scattering properties are directly proportional to these losses. To study the impact of parasitics, I quantify the useful absorption enhancement of two different light trapping mechanisms, i.e. diffractive vs plasmonic, based on a fair and simple experimental comparison. The experiment demonstrates that diffractive light-trapping is a better choice for photovoltaic applications, because plasmonic structures accumulate the parasitical losses by multiple interactions with the trapped light.

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Section: Phase Engineeringmentioning

confidence: 95%

Diffractive Optics for Thin-Film Silicon Solar Cells

Schuster¹

2017

Springer Theses

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“…In our design, these back scatterers are designed to couple incident light into guided modes supported by the cell with high intensity in the absorbing semiconductor layer, dramatically reducing the thickness requirements by redirecting the absorption path into the plane of the solar cell. As opposed to cells with purely grating-based reflectors [26,27,28,122] or nanostructure designs to couple specifically to surface plasmon polariton modes [67], the design presented here takes advantage of the high scattering cross sections of plasmonic nanostructures to couple to photonic waveguide modes.…”

Section: Advantages Of Light Trapping For A-si:hmentioning

confidence: 99%

Light Trapping in Plasmonic Solar Cells

Ferry

2011

Frontiers in Optics 2011/Laser Science XXVII

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“…HOGA is also compared with a commercial program for optimization of hybrid systems. Lin and Phillips (2008) used a genetic algorithm to optimize the multi-level rectangular and arbitrary gratings. Solar cells with optimized multi-level rectangular gratings exhibit a 23% improvement over planar cells and 3.8% improvement over the optimal cell with periodic gratings.…”

Section: Applications Of Fuzzy Logicmentioning

confidence: 99%