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Towards ultra-thin plasmonic silicon wafer solar cells with minimized efficiency loss
The cost-effectiveness of market-dominating silicon wafer solar cells plays a key role in determining the competiveness of solar energy with other exhaustible energy sources. Reducing the silicon wafer thickness at a minimized efficiency loss represents a mainstream trend in increasing the cost-effe...
Autores principales: | , , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Nature Publishing Group
2014
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4018607/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24820403 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/srep04939 |
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author | Zhang, Yinan Stokes, Nicholas Jia, Baohua Fan, Shanhui Gu, Min |
author_facet | Zhang, Yinan Stokes, Nicholas Jia, Baohua Fan, Shanhui Gu, Min |
author_sort | Zhang, Yinan |
collection | PubMed |
description | The cost-effectiveness of market-dominating silicon wafer solar cells plays a key role in determining the competiveness of solar energy with other exhaustible energy sources. Reducing the silicon wafer thickness at a minimized efficiency loss represents a mainstream trend in increasing the cost-effectiveness of wafer-based solar cells. In this paper we demonstrate that, using the advanced light trapping strategy with a properly designed nanoparticle architecture, the wafer thickness can be dramatically reduced to only around 1/10 of the current thickness (180 μm) without any solar cell efficiency loss at 18.2%. Nanoparticle integrated ultra-thin solar cells with only 3% of the current wafer thickness can potentially achieve 15.3% efficiency combining the absorption enhancement with the benefit of thinner wafer induced open circuit voltage increase. This represents a 97% material saving with only 15% relative efficiency loss. These results demonstrate the feasibility and prospect of achieving high-efficiency ultra-thin silicon wafer cells with plasmonic light trapping. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-4018607 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2014 |
publisher | Nature Publishing Group |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-40186072014-05-13 Towards ultra-thin plasmonic silicon wafer solar cells with minimized efficiency loss Zhang, Yinan Stokes, Nicholas Jia, Baohua Fan, Shanhui Gu, Min Sci Rep Article The cost-effectiveness of market-dominating silicon wafer solar cells plays a key role in determining the competiveness of solar energy with other exhaustible energy sources. Reducing the silicon wafer thickness at a minimized efficiency loss represents a mainstream trend in increasing the cost-effectiveness of wafer-based solar cells. In this paper we demonstrate that, using the advanced light trapping strategy with a properly designed nanoparticle architecture, the wafer thickness can be dramatically reduced to only around 1/10 of the current thickness (180 μm) without any solar cell efficiency loss at 18.2%. Nanoparticle integrated ultra-thin solar cells with only 3% of the current wafer thickness can potentially achieve 15.3% efficiency combining the absorption enhancement with the benefit of thinner wafer induced open circuit voltage increase. This represents a 97% material saving with only 15% relative efficiency loss. These results demonstrate the feasibility and prospect of achieving high-efficiency ultra-thin silicon wafer cells with plasmonic light trapping. Nature Publishing Group 2014-05-13 /pmc/articles/PMC4018607/ /pubmed/24820403 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/srep04939 Text en Copyright © 2014, Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. The images in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the image credit; if the image is not included under the Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder in order to reproduce the image. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ |
spellingShingle | Article Zhang, Yinan Stokes, Nicholas Jia, Baohua Fan, Shanhui Gu, Min Towards ultra-thin plasmonic silicon wafer solar cells with minimized efficiency loss |
title | Towards ultra-thin plasmonic silicon wafer solar cells with minimized efficiency loss |
title_full | Towards ultra-thin plasmonic silicon wafer solar cells with minimized efficiency loss |
title_fullStr | Towards ultra-thin plasmonic silicon wafer solar cells with minimized efficiency loss |
title_full_unstemmed | Towards ultra-thin plasmonic silicon wafer solar cells with minimized efficiency loss |
title_short | Towards ultra-thin plasmonic silicon wafer solar cells with minimized efficiency loss |
title_sort | towards ultra-thin plasmonic silicon wafer solar cells with minimized efficiency loss |
topic | Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4018607/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24820403 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/srep04939 |
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