However, silicon's abundance, and its domination of the semiconductor manufacturing industry has made it difficult for other materials to compete. An optimum silicon solar cell with light trapping and very good surface passivation is about 100 µm thick.
In principle, a 50 μm thick layer of high quality crystalline silicon together with an efficient light trapping scheme and well passivated surfaces is all that is required to achieve high solar cell efficiencies, even above 20%, and this has already been demonstrated .
In this case the optimum solar cell thickness lies around 75 μm with a broad efficiency maximum value of 21% for the 50–100 μm cell thickness range. Fig. 4. Influence of surface passivation and light trapping on the simulated thickness dependence of crystalline silicon solar cell efficiency.
Basic schematic of a silicon solar cell. The top layer is referred to as the emitter and the bulk material is referred to as the base. Bulk crystalline silicon dominates the current photovoltaic market, in part due to the prominence of silicon in the integrated circuit market.
However, there is a physical limit depending on the number of junctions and the material properties that bounds the maximum achievable efficiency. The current industry is built upon single-junction crystalline silicon cells, as silicon is the second most abundant material on Earth, and it is non-toxic.
The best real-world silicon solar cell to date, developed by Kaneka Corporation, is able to achieve 26.7% conversion efficiency 7, 8. A loss analysis of this 165 μm -thick, heterojunction IBC cell shows that in absence of any extrinsic loss mechanism the limiting efficiency of such a cell would be 29.1% 7.
Silicon Solar Cells, Crystalline | SpringerLink
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