Optimizing Thin-Film Silicon Solar Cells with Nanostructured TiO2 and Silver Back Reflector for Enhanced Energy Conversion Efficiency

• Basma Abu-elmaaty, Tawfik Ismail, Ala H. Sabeeh, and Khawaji Ibrahim
• received 02/18/2024; accepted 04/16/2024; posted 04/16/2024; Doc. ID 521845
• Abstract: This paper investigates the improvement of energy conversion efficiency in thin-film silicon solar cells by employing periodic nanostructures of TiO2 on the silicon active layer and aback reflector featuring periodic nanostructures of silver. The objective is to increase the opticalpath length, enhance absorption probability for longer wavelengths, and subsequently improvesolar cell performance. Three silicon-based solar cell configurations are proposed and simulatedusing the finite difference time domain (FDTD) method to assess their performance. Electricalcharacteristics are obtained through the drift-diffusion method. The resulting short-circuit currentdensity increased from 40.93 mA/cm2to 65.28 mA/cm2to 95.373 mA/cm2for the three cells,leading to significant improvements in conversion efficiency with observed values of 20.39%,33.26%, and 47.28%, respectively, in the optimized structures. Furthermore, we compare thesimulation results of the three structures with those of a reference structure and several structurespreviously proposed in the literature.