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Deep level transient spectroscopy has been used to study the spatial properties of the N1-admittance feature in Cu(In, Ga)Se2 devices. By comparison to admittance spectra, the N1-admittance feature has been identified in deep level transient spectra. By varying the filling pulse voltage used to generate the deep level transient spectra, the spatial properties of the N1-admittance feature are determined...
Simulation data of the performance of amorphous hydrogenated silicon (a-Si:H) thin film solar cells using the software package Sentaurus TCAD (Synopsis Inc) are presented. The Sentaurus software is configured with standard theoretical models describing e. g. the density of states in the mobility gap of a-Si:H, generation/recombination statistics, optical data of a-Si:H thin films, etc. to calculate...
Simulation data of the performance of amorphous silicon (a-Si:H) thin film solar cells using the software package Sentaurus TCAD (Synopsis Inc.) are presented. The Sentaurus software is configured with standard theoretical models describing e.g. the density of states in the mobility gap of a-Si:H, generation/recombination statistics, optical data of a-Si:H thin films etc. to calculate illuminated...
Nanohole structures were implemented at various layers in amorphous silicon thin film solar cells designed using 2D and 3D CAD software. Electrical and optical properties of the photovoltaic cell are obtained by modeling such structures using solar cell utility packages. Absorption improvement and thereby conversion efficiency improvement have been achieved over the 300 to 600nm solar spectrum. In...
We have developed thin film amorphous silicon alloy (a-Si:H) and nanocrystalline silicon (nc-Si:H) based multijunction solar cells on lightweight polymer substrate ~25 μm thick for space and near-space applications. The baseline cells use an a-Si:H/a-SiGe:H/a-SiGe:H structure deposited by conventional Radio Frequency (RF) plasma enhanced CVD using roll-to-roll deposition. The best initial performance...
We investigated the novel thin film solar cell with nanoplate structure that can solve the conflict between the light absorption and the carrier transport in amorphous silicon thin film solar cell. This structure has n-type amorphous silicon nanoplate array on the substrate, and the p-layer and i-layer are sequentially grown along the surface of each n-type amorphous silicon nanoplate. Under sunlight...
P-type amorphous silicon was deposited on crystalline n-type silicon substrates to obtain hetero-junction diodes. Additionally, a thin intrinsic amorphous silicon layer was inserted between both the p-type film and the n-type substrate to study its passivation effect on the c-Si surface. We studied the influence of the quality of the amorphous films upon the performance of the hetero-junction diodes...
Fabrication of solar cells on cheap plastics, due to its demand for a low temperature processing (~100?C) needs adaptation of the cell structure of the state-of-the-art high efficiency thin film silicon solar cells made at high temperature (200?C). Use of a double n-layer (n-?c-Si/n-a-Si) instead of a single n-?c-Si layer improves Voc from a low 0.66 V to 0.82 V in the as deposited state of an n-i-p...
In this paper the potential of amorphous silicon carbide used as an emitter for silicon heterojunction solar cells is presented. Especially the annealing behaviour of the open-circuit voltage Voc of n-doped amorphous silicon carbide heterojunction emitter solar cells is investigated in detail. We present our results of a significant open-circuit voltage improvement of more than 100 mV on both a flat...
The cost of photovoltaic (PV) energy generation has been steadily reduced with the increase of solar cell power conversion efficiency and the drop of manufacturing cost. An effective way of lowering the cost of Si thin film solar cells is to increase the solar panel size by growing thin films on large area substrates, where it is important to maintain uniform film properties to ensure efficient and...
We proposed a low cost solution of flexible amorphous silicon solar cells on Polyethylene terephthalate(PET) polymer substrates deposited at low temperatures. PET films were firstly annealed both in the air and in vacuum at different temperatures, and the properties of PET films after annealing were evaluated. Then PET films were exposed to glow discharge Argon plasma in a standard PECVD system to...
The birth of amorphous silicon (a-Si:H) cells came as a promising solution for addressing the world energy needs as compared to its crystalline counterpart. This cutting edge advantage has been attributed largely to the simple fabrication process usually comprising of a glow discharge decomposition of silane (SiH4) using a plasma chemical vapour deposition (PCVD), less material (thin film) and simple...
United Solar Ovonic (USO) has developed a-Si:H based solar cells on polymer substrate using high-throughput roll-to-roll deposition technology for space and stratospheric missions. In addition, we have advanced two new developments: (1) the monolithically laser-integrated module on flexible polymer substrate to attain an initial specific power as high as 2343 W/kg at the module level; and (2) a new...
The n-type hydrogenated microcrystalline silicon-incorporated silicon oxide (n-μc-SiO:H) films are prepared by 13.56 MHz plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition (rf-PECVD) using SiH4, H2 and CO2 gases for an inter-layer between the amorphous silicon (a-Si:H) top-cell and the microcrystalline silicon (μc-Si:H) bottom-cell in the thin-film silicon tandem solar cells. The optical and electrical properties...
Solution-processed spherical surface textures are demonstrated as a cost-effective antireflection coating on commercial amorphous Si solar cells. The spherical textures are formed with a monolayer of silica microspheres by convective coating, followed by a spin-on-glass film. It is found that the spherical texture reduces the reflectance of the cells in a broad wavelength range of 400 - 1,200 nm....
In this work, we have studied the scalability of our fabrication process for heterojunction solar cells up to 148.5 cm2 total area. Double heterojunction devices were fabricated on both n- and p-type textured substrates using only doped (n) and (p) a-Si:H layers. ITO was used as anti-reflective coating and evaporated Aluminum as the metallic back contact. Finally, an Ag grid was screen-printed at...
Thin film ZnO/Si heterojunction solar cells were explored for their potentially low cost application. Microcrystalline silicon (??c-Si) deposited by metal induced growth (MIG) demonstrated viable photo response as a thin film base layer. Modeling using AMPS-1D was performed on various heterostructures. In thin film devices, Interface defects of 8.8??1011 1/cm2-eV were shown to significantly reduce...
A modeling methodology based on an accurate distributed SPICE model is developed to analyze the impact of non-uniformity on the performance of large-area thin-film modules. The simulation quantifies the losses due to spatial variations in process, using an assumed thickness distribution across the module. The analysis of local operating points elucidates the ability of the circuit to adapt voltage...
ECN is developing a novel fabrication process for thin film silicon solar cells on steel foil. Key features in this process chain are: 1) application of an insulating barrier layer which enables texturization of the rear contact with submicron structures for light trapping; 2) Si deposition with remote, linear PECVD; 3) series interconnection by laser scribing and printing after deposition of the...
Due to the electrical mismatch between the individual cells, the actual efficiency of a PV module is always lower than the sum of the cells under normal measurement conditions. The effect of this electrical mismatch is simulated for single junction amorphous silicon PV modules as well as micromorph thin film PV modules. This paper reports on the design of the realistic parameter distribution for the...
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