Greatly Enhanced Photovoltaic Performance of Crystalline Silicon Solar Cells via Metal Oxide

Lingling Zhou; Lufei Xiao; Hai Yang; Jie Liu; Xibin Yu

doi:10.3390/nano8070505

Greatly Enhanced Photovoltaic Performance of Crystalline Silicon Solar Cells via Metal Oxide

Nanomaterials (Basel). 2018 Jul 7;8(7):505. doi: 10.3390/nano8070505.

Authors

Lingling Zhou¹, Lufei Xiao², Hai Yang³, Jie Liu⁴, Xibin Yu⁵

Affiliations

¹ Department of Food and Environmental Engineering, Chuzhou Vocational and Technical College, Chuzhou 239000, China. zhoulingling2018@gmail.com.
² Department of Food and Environmental Engineering, Chuzhou Vocational and Technical College, Chuzhou 239000, China. tangshiyong001@gmail.com.
³ The Education Ministry Key Laboratory of Resource Chemistry and Shanghai Key Laboratory of Rare Earth Functional Materials, Department of Chemistry, Shanghai Normal University, Shanghai 200234, China. benjaejong@gmail.com.
⁴ The Education Ministry Key Laboratory of Resource Chemistry and Shanghai Key Laboratory of Rare Earth Functional Materials, Department of Chemistry, Shanghai Normal University, Shanghai 200234, China. liujie@shnu.edu.cn.
⁵ The Education Ministry Key Laboratory of Resource Chemistry and Shanghai Key Laboratory of Rare Earth Functional Materials, Department of Chemistry, Shanghai Normal University, Shanghai 200234, China. xibinyu@shnu.edu.cn.

Abstract

Band-gap alignment engineering has now been extensively studied due to its high potential for application. Here we demonstrate a simple route to synthesize two metal oxide layers and align them together according to their bandgaps on the surface of crystalline silicon (c-Si) solar cells. The metal oxide layers not only extend absorption spectrum to generate extra carriers but also more efficiently separate electron⁻hole pairs. As a consequence, the photovoltaic performance of SnO₂/CdO/Si double-layer solar cell (DLSC) is highly improved compared to the controlled Si solar cell, CdO/Si and SnO₂/Si single-layer solar cells (SLSCs). Via alignment engineering, the SnO₂/CdO/Si DLSC produces a short circuit photocurrent (J_sc) of 38.20 mA/cm², an open circuit photovoltage (V_oc) of 0.575 V and a fill factor (FF) of 68.7%, a conversion efficiency (η) of 15.09% under AM1.5 illumination.

Keywords: electron–hole pairs; semiconductors; silicon solar cells.