Broadband Photon Harvesting Capability Enhancement with Plasmonic Inspired Nanostructure based Solar Cell

Md Ibrahim Khalil1, Atiqur Rahman1, Arshad M Chowdhury1,2, Nowshad Amin3, Gee-Kung Chang2 1Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, North South University, Dhaka, Bangladesh /2School of Electrical and computer Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, United States /3Department of Electrical, Electronic & Systems Engineering, Faculty of Engineering and Built Environment, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, Selangor, Malaysia

Efficient light trapping in a solar cell can improve the overall performance and substantially reduce its cost. Even though thin-film photovoltaic (PV) offers significant cost reduction compared to traditional bulky thick film Photovoltaics, the overall performance is not optimal due to low absorption. Plasmonic light trapping techniques introduced recently in photovoltaics can provide better light absorption without increasing the device thickness. In this paper, we propose and demonstrate a simple plasmonic nanostructure based crystalline silicon (C-Si) solar cell by integrating the silver core with Silicon Nanowire (NW) to increase the overall absorption efficiency. We have found by numerical simulation and 3-D Electromagnetic modeling that for fixed filling ratio and length the proposed structure demonstrates 64% improvement in ultimate efficiency and current density compared to the conventional NW structures up to 300nm lattice constant.