TY - GEN
T1 - Revisiting light trapping in silicon solar cells with random pyramids
AU - Manzoor, Salman
AU - Filipic, Miha
AU - Topic, Marko
AU - Holman, Zachary
N1 - Funding Information:
This material is based upon work primarily supported by the Engineering Research Center Program of the National Science Foundation and the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy of the Department of Energy under NSF Cooperative Agreement No. EEC-1041895.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2017 IEEE.
PY - 2017
Y1 - 2017
N2 - Random pyramids are the most widely used texture in monocrystalline silicon solar cells for reducing front- surface reflection and trapping weakly absorbed light. In prior efforts to evaluate the light-trapping performance of random pyramids through optical simulations, the base angle of the pyramids was assumed to be 54.7°, as is expected from the orientation of the crystallographic planes. In this contribution, we benchmark the light-trapping capability of real random pyramids - which have a distribution of base angles - against both ideal, 54.7° random pyramids, and a Lambertian scatterer. We do so by calculating the path length enhancement and fraction of rays remaining trapped as a function of passes through the wafer, and this information is used to calculate short- circuit current density as a function of wafer thickness. Interestingly, the excellent performance of real random pyramids - they are close to Lambertian - arises precisely because they are imperfect and have a distribution of angles.
AB - Random pyramids are the most widely used texture in monocrystalline silicon solar cells for reducing front- surface reflection and trapping weakly absorbed light. In prior efforts to evaluate the light-trapping performance of random pyramids through optical simulations, the base angle of the pyramids was assumed to be 54.7°, as is expected from the orientation of the crystallographic planes. In this contribution, we benchmark the light-trapping capability of real random pyramids - which have a distribution of base angles - against both ideal, 54.7° random pyramids, and a Lambertian scatterer. We do so by calculating the path length enhancement and fraction of rays remaining trapped as a function of passes through the wafer, and this information is used to calculate short- circuit current density as a function of wafer thickness. Interestingly, the excellent performance of real random pyramids - they are close to Lambertian - arises precisely because they are imperfect and have a distribution of angles.
KW - Atomic force microscopy
KW - Light trapping
KW - Photovoltaic cells
KW - Ray tracing
KW - Silicon
KW - Surface morphology
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U2 - 10.1109/PVSC.2017.8366697
DO - 10.1109/PVSC.2017.8366697
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85048498794
T3 - 2017 IEEE 44th Photovoltaic Specialist Conference, PVSC 2017
SP - 3061
EP - 3066
BT - 2017 IEEE 44th Photovoltaic Specialist Conference, PVSC 2017
PB - Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
T2 - 44th IEEE Photovoltaic Specialist Conference, PVSC 2017
Y2 - 25 June 2017 through 30 June 2017
ER -