Enhancement of Light Absorption in Photovoltaic Devices using Textured Polydimethylsiloxane Stickers

We designed and fabricated a random-size inverted-pyramid-structured polydimethylsiloxane (RSIPS-PDMS) sticker to enhance the light absorption of solar cells and thus increase their efficiency. The fabricated sticker was laminated onto bare glass and crystalline silicon (c-Si) surfaces; consequently...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:ACS applied materials & interfaces 2017-06, Vol.9 (25), p.21276-21282
Main Authors: Hwang, Inchan, Choi, Deokjae, Lee, Sojeong, Seo, Ji hoon, Kim, Ka-Hyun, Yoon, Ilsun, Seo, Kwanyong
Format: Article
Language:English
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Summary:We designed and fabricated a random-size inverted-pyramid-structured polydimethylsiloxane (RSIPS-PDMS) sticker to enhance the light absorption of solar cells and thus increase their efficiency. The fabricated sticker was laminated onto bare glass and crystalline silicon (c-Si) surfaces; consequently, low solar-weighted reflectance values were obtained for these surfaces (6.88 and 17.2%, respectively). In addition, we found that incident light was refracted at the PDMS–air interface of each RSIPS, which redirected the incident power and significantly increased the optical path length in the RSIPS-PDMS sticker which was 14.7% greater than that in a flat-PDMS sticker. Moreover, we investigated power reflection and propagation through the RSIPS-PDMS sticker using a finite-difference time-domain method. By attaching an RSIPS-PDMS sticker onto both an organic solar cell (OSC) based on a glass substrate and a c-Si solar cell, the power conversion efficiency of the OSC and the c-Si solar cell were increased from 8.57 to 8.94% and from 16.2 to 17.9%, respectively. Thus, the RSIPS-PDMS sticker is expected to be universally applicable to the surfaces of solar cells to enhance their light absorption.
ISSN:1944-8244
1944-8252
DOI:10.1021/acsami.7b04525