Engineering and Applied Science Research (Mar 2022)
Effect of active layer thickness on the performance of amorphous hydrogenated silicon solar cells
Abstract
Hydrogenated amorphous silicon (a-Si: H) materials have received a great deal of attention for their potential to make inexpensive solar cells. In this work, we report that the effect of adding active layers in the a-Si: H p-i-n to p-i1-i2-n solar cell structure greatly affects the increase in conversion efficiency. Solar cells a-Si: H p-i1-i2-n were grown using the Plasma Enhanced Chemical Vapor Deposition (PECVD) technique on Indium Tin Oxide (ITO) substrate. The ITO substrate used for transparency and conductivity properties are superior among other oxide materials. The a-Si: H p-i1-i2-n solar cells were characterized including optical properties, electrical properties, energy gap using Spectroscopic Ellipsometric (SE), surface morphology using Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM) and solar cell performance (I-V curve) measured using solar simulator. The structure of solar cells a-Si: H p-i1-i2-n functions to capture sunlight energy that is not captured by the first intrinsic layer and can then be captured by the second intrinsic layer. Our results show that there is a very good increase from 7.79% in the p-i1-i2-n sample to 8.49% in the p-i2-i1-n sample.
