In recent years, photovoltaic cells have attracted much attention and extensively been studied by many groups. The
amorphous silicon (a-Si) thin film solar cells have the advantages of lower cost, less material consumption and potential
for the building-integrated applications although the conversion efficiency is usually below 10%. In this paper, we show
an a-Si thin film solar cell with periodical nanorod structures for light trapping enhancement and an ultrathin silver film
as transparent electrode with a lower resistance for performance improvement. In such a design, the conversion
efficiency can be greatly improved. The periodicity and duty ratio of the nanorods were optimized to enhance the
diffraction of the light within 500-900 nm into guided modes in the a-Si thin film and thus the total optical absorption
can be enhanced. Furthermore, a 5-nm ultrathin metal film was used as a transparent electrode to replace the
conventional transparent conductive oxide while having a lower sheet resistance of 9.6 Ω/ and a transmittance from
90% to 70% within the spectral range from 300 nm to 900 nm. Our design was analyzed by using the full-wave finiteelement
method to calculate the optical absorption of the incident sunlight in the a-Si thin film. According to the
simulation results, the light absorption can be relatively enhanced by 69.6% and the total conversion efficiency can be
relatively improved by 41.6% compared to the conventional thin film a-Si solar cell without nanorod structures.
Access to the requested content is limited to institutions that have purchased or subscribe to SPIE eBooks.
You are receiving this notice because your organization may not have SPIE eBooks access.*
*Shibboleth/Open Athens users─please
sign in
to access your institution's subscriptions.
To obtain this item, you may purchase the complete book in print or electronic format on
SPIE.org.
INSTITUTIONAL Select your institution to access the SPIE Digital Library.
PERSONAL Sign in with your SPIE account to access your personal subscriptions or to use specific features such as save to my library, sign up for alerts, save searches, etc.