NUMERICAL SIMULATION OF THERMAL BEHAVIOR AND OPTIMIZATION OF a-Si/a-Si/C-Si/a-Si/A-Si HIT SOLAR CELL AT HIGH TEMPERATURES

Abstract

Purpose. Silicon heterostructure solar cells, particularly Heterojunction with Intrinsic Thin layer (HIT) cells, are of recommended silicon cells in recent years that are simply fabricated at low processing temperature and have high optical and temperature stability and better efficiency than homojunction solar cells. In this paper, at first a relatively accurate computational model is suggested for more precise calculation of the thermal behavior of such cells. In this model, the thermal dependency of many parameters such as mobility, thermal velocity of carriers, band gap, Urbach energy of band tails, electron affinity, relative permittivity, and effective density of states in the valence and conduction bands are considered for all semiconductor layers. The thermal behavior of HIT solar cells in the range of 25-75 °C is studied by using of this model. The effect of the thickness of different layers of HIT cell on its external parameters has been investigated in this temperature range, and finally the optimal thicknesses of HIT solar cell layers to use in wide temperature range are proposed.

Keywords

• heterojunction with intrinsic thin layer cell
• high temperature
• thermal behavior