Our primary goal is to increase the stabilized efficiency of thin film silicon solar cells in the substrate (nip) configuration by using textured substrates and tandem structures, based on amorphous (a-Si:H) and microcrystalline silicon (μc-Si:H). In order to reduce costs of mass-produced thin film solar modules, special attention has been paid in developing processes compatible with plastic fo...

To investigate the hole transport across amorphous/crystalline silicon heterojunctions, solar cells with varying band offsets were fabricated using amorphous silicon suboxide films. The suboxides enable good passivation if covered by a doped amorphous silicon layer. Increasing valence band offsets yield rising hole transport barriers and reduced device effciencies. Carrier transport by thermal ...

From different sources of carbon , propane have been chosen to get a wider band gap amorphous silicon alloy . After analyzing the conductivity and optical gap variation with the doping ratio , the best were used to fabricate 5x5 cm solar cells . Those cells are connected to form 75 x 75 cm panels. Photo-oxidation were carried out using different sources as an accelerated method to study the met...

With an amorphous silicon (a-Si:H)/crystalline silicon (c-Si) heterojunction structure, the heterojunction with intrinsic thin-layer (HIT) solar cell has become one of the most promising technologies for c-Si based solar cells. By replacing a-Si:H thin films with appropriate compound semiconductors, we propose novel heterojunction structures which allow c-Si heterojunction solar cells to posses...

Today, due to qualitative growth and scientific advances, energy, especially electricity is increasingly needed by human society. One of the almost endless and pure energy which have been paid attention over the years is the solar energy. Solar cells directly convert solar energy into electrical energy and are one of the main blocks of photovoltaic systems. Significant improvement has been made...

Thick wafer-silicon is the dominant solar cell technology. It is of great interest to develop ultra-thin solar cells that can reduce materials usage, but still achieve acceptable performance and high solar absorption. Accordingly, we developed a highly absorbing ultra-thin crystalline Si based solar cell architecture using periodically patterned front and rear dielectric nanocone arrays which p...

Hole drift mobilities in hydrogenated amorphous silicon (a-Si:H) and nanocrystalline silicon (nc-Si:H) are in the range of 10 to 1 cm/Vs at room-temperature. These low drift mobilities establish corresponding hole mobility limits to the power generation and useful thicknesses of the solar cells. The properties of as-deposited a-Si:H nip solar cells are quite close to their hole mobility limit, ...

Continuous cost reduction of silicon-based solar cells is needed to lower the process time and increase efficiency. To achieve lower costs, screen-printed texture-barrier (SPTB) paste was first developed for single-side texturization (ST) of the interdigitated back-contact (IBC) for silicon-based solar cell applications. The SPTB paste was screen-printed on silicon substrates. The SPTB paste wa...

Sparse arrays of evaporated silver nanodisks were fabricated with nanosphere lithography (NSL) on glass substrates and on hydrogenated nanocrystalline silicon solar cells. The optical transmittance spectra for arrays on glass vary substantially with film thickness, and were reasonably consistent with previous work. The quantum efficiency spectra of hydrogenated nanocrystalline silicon solar cel...

The density of states (DOS) of crystalline silicon changes with the introduction of dopants due to the formation of an impurity band and band tails. Until now, the DOS of undoped silicon has been used to model silicon devices, regardless of the doping level. This approximation may not be satisfactory for the emitter and back surface field regions of silicon solar cells. Therefore, we measured t...