Excimer laser textured thin film silicon and poly 2-methoxy-52 -ethylhexyloxy -1,4-phenylenevinylene bilayer solar cells are fabricated and characterized with air mass 1.5 simulated solar irradiation. The polymer layer increases the light harvesting capability of the cell and increases the shunt resistance while increasing open circuit voltage. The highest efficiency of 0.87% for the thin film ...

This paper describes how capacitance–voltage (C-V) and Kelvin probe (KP) measurements can be combined to determine the magnitude and centroid of the electric charge in a thin-film insulator. The technique is demonstrated on three films of relevance to silicon solar cells: aluminium oxide, amorphous silicon nitride and silicon dioxide. Since the charge within these films is of different magnitud...

Today, Solar cell technology is in limited use due to the relatively high manufacturing cost of silicon based technology, And the low power efficiency of organic polymer based technology. However, Research is being done on hybrid cells based on dye-sensitizing organic polymers and a thin transparent conducting oxide layer comprised of nanoparticles. These cells could offer the same ease of manu...

Thin, light-absorbing films attenuate the Raman signal of underlying substrates. In this article, we exploit this phenomenon to develop a contactless thickness profiling method for thin films deposited on rough substrates. We demonstrate this technique by probing profiles of thin amorphous silicon stripes deposited on rough crystalline silicon surfaces, which is a structure exploited in high-ef...

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...

Crystalline silicon solar cells 10–15 times thinner than traditional commercial c-Si cells with 14.9% efficiency are presented with modeling, fabrication, and testing details. These cells are 14 mm thick, 250 mm wide, and have achieved 14.9% solar conversion efficiency under AM 1.5 spectrum. First, modeling results illustrate the importance of high-quality passivation to achieve high efficiency...

Formation of a selective emitter in crystalline silicon solar cells improves photovoltaic conversion efficiency by decoupling emitter regions for light absorption (moderately doped) and metallization (degenerately doped). However, use of a selective emitter in silicon nanowire (Si NW) solar cells is technologically challenging because of difficulties in forming robust Ohmic contacts that interf...

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...