Black Silicon Enhanced Thin Film Silicon Photovoltaic Devices
SiOnyx has developed an enhanced thin film silicon photovoltaic device with improved efficiency. Thin film silicon solar cells suffer from low material absorption characteristics resulting in poor cell efficiencies. SiOnyx’s approach leverages Black Silicon, an advanced material fabricated using ultrafast lasers. The laser treated films show dramatic enhancement in optical absorption with measured values in excess of 90% in the visible spectrum and well over 50% in the near infrared spectrum. Thin film Black Silicon solar cells demonstrate 25% higher current generation with almost no impact on open circuit voltage as compared with representative control samples. The initial prototypes demonstrated an improvement of nearly 2 percentage points in the suns Voc efficiency measurement. In addition we validated the capability to scale this processing technology to the throughputs (< 5 min/m2) required for volume production using state of the art commercially available high power industrial lasers. With these results we clearly demonstrate feasibility for the enhancement of thin film solar cells with this laser processing technique.
- Research Organization:
- SiOnyx, Inc.
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE Office of Solar Energy Technology Program (EE-2A)
- DOE Contract Number:
- EE0000581
- OSTI ID:
- 984305
- Report Number(s):
- SOI-0901-004; TRN: US201106%%280
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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