Modeling and Analysis of Different Antireflection Polymer Coating on Silicon Solar Cell Using Pc1d Software
Author(s):
Rafah Ibraheem Jabbar
Affiliation(s):
College of Material’s Engineering, University of Babylon, Babylon, Iraq
Corresponding Author Email: [email protected]
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Recently, global companies are competing to improve the efficiency of solar cells and supporting the researches that contribute in the development of solar cell technologies. One of the important issues that affect the efficiency of solar cell conversion system is an optical loss which caused due to the fact that an incident light is reflected back from the surface of the solar cell. Coating the solar cell using antireflection materials can increase the light absorbed by the cell surface and thus solving the issue. The main objective of this paper is to design a silicon solar cell model using PC1D simulation software. A silicon solar cell model with 10 x 10 cm2 area and thickness of 300 and 2 µm for P and N layer respectively was simulated in PC1D with consideration two cases: one silicon solar cell model without antireflection coating (ARC) materials, and others with five ARC materials. The impact of a single layer Antireflection coating based on five polymeric materials on silicon solar cell efficiency has been analyzed. The proposed polymer materials are Poly dimethyl siloxane (PDMS), Polystyrene (PS), Poly methyl methacrylate (PMMA), Polyethylene terephthalate (PET) and Polycarbonate (PC). The initial simulation results show that the solar cell efficiency is about 15.39%. A great enhancement in solar cell efficiency was achieved with utilizing ARC materials. It was found that the optimum efficiency can be obtained at 600 nm wavelength for all selected ARC materials. Among five ARC polymer materials, Polycarbonate (PC) realized a good improvement which reached about 5% on the solar cell efficiency. The electrical characteristics, and efficiency of solar cells have been analyzed at each wavelength in this paper.