The ultra-small textured surface of multicrystalline silicon solar cell,prepared by electroless chemical-etching method,shows an excellent anti-reflection property over a wide spectral bandwidth.A novel back surface protection method and front surface passivation method have been used in the multicrystalline solar cells with ultra-small textured surfaces.With these improvements,the back surface remains intact after the etch process and the efficient minority lifetime is apparently increased.The test result shows that the solar cell with ultra-small textured surface can obtain better electrical performances by these improvements.
Silicon solar cells are prepared following the conventional fabrication processes, except for the metal- lization firing process. The cells are divided into two groups with higher and lower fill factors, respectively. After light-induced plating （LIP）, the fill factors of the solar cells in both groups with different initial values reach the same level. Scanning electron microscope （SEM） images are taken under the bulk silver electrodes, which prove that the improvement for cells with a poor factor after LIP should benefit from sufficient exploitation of the high density silver crystals formed during the firing process. Moreover, the application of LIP to cells with poor electrode contact performance, such as nanowire cells and radial junction solar cells, is proposed.
The n-type silicon integrated-back contact（IBC） solar cell has attracted much attention due to its high efficiency,whereas its performance is very sensitive to the wafer of low quality or the contamination during high temperature fabrication processing, which leads to low bulk lifetime τbulk. In order to clarify the influence of bulk lifetime on cell characteristics, two-dimensional（2D） TCAD simulation, combined with our experimental data, is used to simulate the cell performances, with the wafer thickness scaled down under various τbulk conditions. The modeling results show that for the IBC solar cell with high τbulk,（such as 1 ms-2 ms）, its open-circuit voltage V oc almost remains unchanged, and the short-circuit current density J sc monotonically decreases as the wafer thickness scales down. In comparison, for the solar cell with low τbulk（for instance, 〈 500 μs） wafer or the wafer contaminated during device processing, the V oc increases monotonically but the J sc first increases to a maximum value and then drops off as the wafer＇s thickness decreases. A model combing the light absorption and the minority carrier diffusion is used to explain this phenomenon. The research results show that for the wafer with thinner thickness and high bulk lifetime, the good light trapping technology must be developed to offset the decrease in J sc.
Interdigitated back contact-heterojunction （IBC-HJ） solar cells can have a conversion efficiency of over 25%. However, the front surface passivation and structure have a great influence on the properties of the IBC-HJ solar cell. In this paper, detailed numerical simulations have been performed to investigate the potential of front surface field （FSF） offered by stack of n-type doped and intrinsic amorphous silicon （a-Si） layers on the front surface of IBC-HJ solar cells. Simulations results clearly indicate that the electric field of FSF should be strong enough to repel minority carries and cumulate major carriers near the front surface. However, the overstrong electric field tends to drive electrons into a-Si layer, leading to severe recombination loss. The n-type doped amorphous silicon （n-a-Si） layer has been optimized in terms of doping level and thickness. The optimized intrinsic amorphous silicon （i-a-Si） layer should be as thin as possible with an energy band gap （Es） larger than 1.4 eV. In addition, the simulations concerning interface defects strongly suggest that FSF is essential when the front surface is not passivated perfectly. Without FSF, the IBC-HJ solar cells may become more sensitive to interface defect density.
Rui JIAKe TAOQiang LIXiaowan DAIHengchao SUNYun SUNZhi JINXinyu LIU
Nanostructure-textured solar cell owns unique properties but has some shortages especially in its fabrication and passivation.In this paper,nanostructures for crystalline silicon solar cell have been synthesized by controllable method based on silver catalyzed chemical etching.In this way,only the front surface of cell is etched and rear surface is protected.It was found that cells textured via the new method obtained equally excellent optical while superior electrical properties compared with those textured via traditional HF/AgNO3 etching.The V OC and I SC of the cell were improved by 6% and 11%,respectively.Then the cells were passivated via a bi-layer passivation(SiO2 & SiN x),in contrast to traditional SiN x passivation.It was also found that cells with new passivation exhibited improved V OC and I SC by 4% and 25%,respectively.The encouraging results can provide fundamental data for developing the nanostructure-textured crystalline silicon solar cell in following researches.
