1. 2 New Materials and Concepts for Cells and Modules
Summary / Abstract:
Solar cells made of radial junction nanowires (NWs) mitigate the problem of short diffusion lengths of hydrogenated amorphous silicon (a-S:H). Besides, they are highly cost-efficient, since they can be grown on glass on large areas at rather low temperatures (around 400 °C) with plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition (PECVD) technique, leading to an energy conversion efficiency of over 9%.1 However, their complex morphology makes it challenging to develop a low resistance/high transmittance top contact. In this work, we focus first on finding a transparent and flexible kind of electrode for radial junction NW solar cells. A hybrid contact made of ITO and Ag NWs is proposed and optimized. We then implement this contact on flexible Si/a-Si:H NW cells to achieve low-cost flexible inorganic PV devices. We also characterize the optical and electrical properties of the electrode directly on the device. To this end, we compare the performance of the cells under different illumination levels.
Conference Programme