In order to further improve the economies of scale which are inherent in ECD’s continuous roil-to-roll amorphous silicon alloy solar cell manufacturing process, we have developed a concept for a serpentine web plasma CVD deposition process to maximize throughput while keeping the size of the deposition chambers small. When this technique is incorporated into a continuous rollto-roll PV manufact...

This paper reports inverted pyramid microstructure-based single-crystalline silicon (sc-Si) solar cell with a conversion efficiency up to 20.19% in standard size of 156.75 × 156.75 mm2. The inverted pyramid microstructures were fabricated jointly by metal-assisted chemical etching process (MACE) with ultra-low concentration of silver ions and optimized alkaline anisotropic texturing process. An...

We employ a ZnO nanorod/Si(3)N(4)-coated Si microgroove-based hierarchical structure (HS) for a light-harvesting scheme in 5 inch single crystalline Si solar cells. ZnO nanorods and Si microgrooves were fabricated by a simple and scalable aqueous process. The excellent light-harvesting characteristics of the HS, such as broadband working ranges and omnidirectionality have been demonstrated usin...

Nanowires (NWs) are recently used in several sensor or actuator devices to improve their ordered characteristics. Silicon nanowire (Si NW) is one of the most attractive one-dimensional nanostructures semiconductors because of its unique electrical and optical properties. In this paper, silicon nanowire (Si NW), is synthesized and characterized for application in photovoltaic device. Si NWs are ...

Silicon (Si)/organic polymer hybrid solar cells have great potential for becoming cost-effective and efficient energy-harvesting devices. We report herein on the effects of polymer coverage and the rear electrode on the device performance of Si/poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene): poly(styrenesulfonate) (PEDOT:PSS) hybrid solar cells with micro-pyramidal structures. These hybrid solar cells provid...

In this paper, we report our recent progress in the amorphous silicon (a-Si)-based photovoltaic research program at The University of Toledo (UT). We have achieved the fabrication of (1) wide bandgap a-Si solar cells with an open-circuit voltage of 0.981 and a "ll factor of 0.728 using high hydrogen dilution for the i-layer deposition, (2) mid bandgap a-SiGe solar cells having an open-circuit v...

For photovoltaic applications, microcrystalline silicon has a lot of advantages, such as the ability to absorb the near-infrared part of the solar spectrum. However, there are many dangling bonds at the grain boundary in microcrystalline Si. These dangling bonds would lead to the recombination of photo-generated carriers and decrease the conversion efficiency. Therefore, we included the grain b...

Silicon nanowire (SiNW) arrays were produced by electroless method on polycrystalline Si substrate, in HF/ AgNO3 solution. Although the monocrystalline silicon wafer is commonly utilized as a perfect substrate, polycrystalline silicon as a low cost substrate was used in this work for photovoltaic applications. In order to study the influence of etching time (which affects the SiNWs length) on d...

A maskless plasma textu~ring technique using Reactive Ion Etching for silicon solar cells results in a very low reflectance of 5.4 % before and 3.9 % after SiN deposition. A detailed study of surface recombination and emitter properties was made, then solar cells were fabricated using the DOSS solar cell process. Different plasmadamage removal treatments are tested to optimize low lifetime sola...