THESIS
2015
xx, 103 pages : illustrations ; 30 cm
Abstract
Introducing light trapping schemes is one of the typical approaches to harvest incoming photon more efficiently in modern thin-film photovoltaic (TF-PV) devices and this is normally realized by texturized front or bottom surface of the solar cell device to enhance light scattering and reduce surface reflection. Conventionally, back surface texture was fabricated by expensive and process with limited scalability such as lithography and reactive ion etching (RIE). In our works, we have developed various nanostructures, including nanowell and nanospike (NSP) array substrates on metal aluminum by simple, well-established anodization with high scalability. More importantly, we revealed that with proper design of morphology of nanostructures, light trapping capability and power conversion eff...[
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Introducing light trapping schemes is one of the typical approaches to harvest incoming photon more efficiently in modern thin-film photovoltaic (TF-PV) devices and this is normally realized by texturized front or bottom surface of the solar cell device to enhance light scattering and reduce surface reflection. Conventionally, back surface texture was fabricated by expensive and process with limited scalability such as lithography and reactive ion etching (RIE). In our works, we have developed various nanostructures, including nanowell and nanospike (NSP) array substrates on metal aluminum by simple, well-established anodization with high scalability. More importantly, we revealed that with proper design of morphology of nanostructures, light trapping capability and power conversion efficiency are significantly enhanced for solar cell with such texture which are supported by both experiments and simulations.
Our optical characterizations have shown that by employing NSP nanostructure, PV thin films demonstrated much improved optical absorption as opposed to the planar control samples over a large wavelength range and incident angle. With specially designed nano-imprint assisted anodization, PV device on the optimized NSP structure lead to 30 % improvement of power conversion efficiency (PCE) as compared with the planar control sample. By producing more efficient photovoltaics, cost of solar energy harvesting can be potentially lowered. This is of great importance for the future development of solar energy harversting. To sum up, we have demonstrated promising potential of nanospike structure for efficient photovoltaic devices. This type of nanostructures can substantially boost the competitiveness of PV over the conventional power generation approaches.
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