Solar cells made of single-crystalline silicon, as alternative energy sources, became the most widely used solar cells in recent years. The mainstream manufacturing approach is to process the cells and assemble these into photovoltaic (PV) modules. However, the direct conversion of solar energy into electricity using the PV effect suffers from low efficiency. Thus, increasing the conversion eff...

As more focus is brought to scaling up perovskite/silicon tandem solar cell technologies, it has been found that optimising the transverse resistance of interconnection leads significant quenching shunt defects in perovskite sub-cell.

Radial n-i-p structure silicon nanowire (SiNW)-based microcrystalline silicon thin-film solar cells on stainless steel foil was fabricated by plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition. The SiNW solar cell displays very low optical reflectance (approximately 15% on average) over a broad range of wavelengths (400 to 1,100 nm). The initial SiNW-based microcrystalline (μc-Si:H) thin-film solar cell...

Hybrid silicon/organic solar cells have been recently extensively investigated due to their simple structure and low-cost fabrication process. However, the efficiency of the solar cells is greatly limited by the barrier height as well as the carrier recombination at the silicon/organic interface. In this work, hydrochloroplatinic acid (H2PtCl6) is employed into the poly(3,4-ethlenedioxythiophen...

A view of contemporary systems and control challenges in PV cell manufacturing is given in this paper, with emphasis on developing a modeling strategy for the optimization of thin-film silicon nitride SiNx:H films used for passivation and anti-reflection coatings in single (sc-) and multicrystalline silicon (mc-Si) solar cells. The overall framework integrates three modeling modules: a remote p...

A photoelectric conversion efficiency of over 10% has been achieved in thin-film polycrystalline silicon solar cells which consists of a 2 μm thick layer of polycrystalline silicon with a very small grain size (microcrystalline silicon) formed by low-temperature plasma CVD. This has shown that if the recombination velocity at grain boundaries can be made very small, then it is not necessarily i...

Organic solar cells have become a suitable photovoltaic technology thanks to their flexibility, scalability and light weight layout. They offer many advantages over the prevalent silicon industry, however, their efficiency is around 11%, still below the usual 20% on commercially available silicon solar panels [1], [2]. In this work, we propose an innovative method to increase light absorption o...

Improving the efficiency of solar cells through novel materials and devices is critical to realize the full potential of solar energy to meet the growing worldwide energy demands. We present here a highly efficient radial p-n junction silicon solar cell using an asymmetric nanowire structure with a shorter bottom core diameter than at the top. A maximum short circuit current density of 27.5 mA/...