My current proposal
Optical Absorption Enhancement for a-si:H Solar Cells using Plasmonic Nanoparticles
Abstract
Solar energy is the most favoured renewable energy that can be harvested and converted to usable electrical energy using solar cells with a drawback of limited efficiency. The light harvesting and power conversion efficiency can be boosted utilizing nanostructured materials, including nanowires, quantum dots, plasmonic materials, and nanoantennas.
In this work, we propose a new structure for an excitonic solar cell with improved light harvesting and power conversion efficiency using plasmonic nanoparticles distributed on the top surface of conical shape solar cell. Different metals will be used as plasmonic nanoparticles such as gold, copper, silver and vanadium dioxide. Hydrogenated amorphous silicon solar cells which has very strong absorbers using n-type, intrinsic, and p-type layers will by used. Therefore only a very thin film is required to capture most of the incident light. These light absorbing molecules can also be deposited with solution processable techniques. This means that large area devices can be manufactured using simple and cheap manufacturing processes. Therefore these solar cells are relatively cheap to produce and can be prepared as flexible devices. The flexible and light-weight nature of these cells means they are more portable than traditional solar cells and can be incorporated more easily into consumer goods, such as backpacks. Another advantage of the strong absorption properties of these types of solar cells is they perform well under low or diffuse light conditions and so can be used indoors. On the other hand, conical shape of PIN is used to enhance the light trapping by multiple reflections of incident light.
The optimum shape, size and position of plasmonic materials and optimum shape and height of the PIN conical shape will be determined using a finite difference time domain (FDTD) simulation tool. According to the parametric study, we will fabricate a prototype for a solar cell that can be industrialized. Electrical and optical properties of the proposed model will be determined and verified with the ones obtained by the parametric study as well.
Proposed structure is illustrated in Figure 1.