Materials 2013, 6(1), 291-298; doi:10.3390/ma6010291
Article

Single Grain Boundary Modeling and Design of Microcrystalline Si Solar Cells

Chu-Hsuan Lin* email, Wen-Tzu Hsuemail and Cheng-Hung Taiemail
Department of Opto-Electronic Engineering, National Dong Hwa University, Shoufeng, Hualien 97401, Taiwan
* Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Received: 23 October 2012; in revised form: 26 December 2012 / Accepted: 15 January 2013 / Published: 21 January 2013
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Photovoltaic Materials)
PDF Full-text Download PDF Full-Text [185 KB, uploaded 21 January 2013 11:56 CET]
Abstract: 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 boundary in the numerical study in order to simulate a microcrystalline Si solar cell accurately, designing new three-terminal microcrystalline Si solar cells. The 3-μm-thick three-terminal cell achieved a conversion efficiency of 10.8%, while the efficiency of a typical two-terminal cell is 9.7%. The three-terminal structure increased the JSC but decreased the VOC, and such phenomena are discussed. High-efficiency and low-cost Si-based thin film solar cells can now be designed based on the information provided in this paper.
Keywords: microcrystalline silicon; grain boundary; three-terminal cell

Article Statistics

Click here to load and display the download statistics.

Cite This Article

MDPI and ACS Style

Lin, C.-H.; Hsu, W.-T.; Tai, C.-H. Single Grain Boundary Modeling and Design of Microcrystalline Si Solar Cells. Materials 2013, 6, 291-298.

AMA Style

Lin C-H, Hsu W-T, Tai C-H. Single Grain Boundary Modeling and Design of Microcrystalline Si Solar Cells. Materials. 2013; 6(1):291-298.

Chicago/Turabian Style

Lin, Chu-Hsuan; Hsu, Wen-Tzu; Tai, Cheng-Hung. 2013. "Single Grain Boundary Modeling and Design of Microcrystalline Si Solar Cells." Materials 6, no. 1: 291-298.

Materials EISSN 1996-1944 Published by MDPI AG, Basel, Switzerland RSS E-Mail Table of Contents Alert