Project Title: BACH PV solar cells
Project Leader: Zahidur R Chowdhury
Supervisor: Prof. Nazir P. Kherani
My role: Device fabrication, cell performance measurement, analysis of the cell performance, report writing.
Tools used: Oxford PlasmaLab 100 PECVD System / DC Saddle Field PECVD Deposition System / Karl Suss Mask Aligner MA 6 / e-beam Metal Deposition and sputtering System / Sinton Silicon Lifetime Tester / Semilab’s µ-PCD lifetime tester / MATLAB / LATEX / Microsoft Office / Origin
Summary
- Facile native oxide-based passivation of crystalline silicon surfaces was integrated within the Back Amorphous-Crystalline silicon Heterojunction (BACH) solar cell concept. The new passivation scheme consists of 1-nm thick native oxide and nominally 70-nm thick PECVD silicon nitride. The low temperature passivation scheme provides uniform high quality surface passivation and low parasitic optical absorption. The interdigitated doped hydrogenated amorphous silicon layers were deposited on the rear side of the silicon wafer using the direct current saddle field PECVD technique. A systematic analysis of a series of back amorphous-crystalline silicon heterojunction cells is carried out in order to examine the influence of the various cell parameters (interdigital gap, n-doped region width, ratio of widths of p, and n-doped regions) on cell performance. A photovoltaic conversion efficiency of 16.7% is obtained for an untextured cell illuminated under AM 1.5 global spectrum (cell parameters: VOC of 641 mV, JSC of 33.7 mA-cm−2 and fill-factor of 77.3%).
- Figure: (left) Schematic diagram of the BACH cell using double side polished crystalline silicon with facile grown SiOx and PECVD SiNx passivation and surface field (right) Cell efficiency as a function of n-width and interdigital gap.
Publication(s)
Zahidur R. Chowdhury and Nazir P Kherani, “Back Amorphous-Crystalline Silicon Heterojunction (BACH) Photovoltaic Device with Facile Grown Oxide - PECVD SiNx Passivation”, Progress in Photovoltaic Research and Application. [ Impact factor 7.7 ] view / link
Zahidur R. Chowdhury and Nazir P. Kherani, “Back Amorphous-Crystalline silicon Heterojunction photovoltaic device: A parametric ptudy”, presented in Next Generation Solar and Photovoltaics Canada National Scientific Conference, Montreal, Canada, 2014. view / link
Zahidur R. Chowdhury and Nazir P. Kherani, “Facile grown oxide based passivation for silicon heterojunction PV cells”, presented in International Conference on Amorphous and Nanocyrstalline Semiconductor (ICANS), Toronto, Canada, 2013. view / link
[ Invited ] Nazir P. Kherani and Zahidur R. Chowdhury, “Facile native oxide based passivation of silicon: an unconventional approach”, presented in Materials Science & Technology 2013, Montreal, 2013. view / link
[ Invited ] Nazir P. Kherani and Zahidur R. Chowdhury, “Nanometer thick native oxide based passivation of silicon for high efficiency photovoltaics”, presented in International Nanoelectronics Conference (INEC), Singapore, 2013. view / link
Zahidur R. Chowdhury, S. Zukotynski and Nazir P. Kherani, “Modeling of thin back amorphous-crystalline silicon heterojuction (BACH) PV”, presented in European Photovoltaic Solar Energy Conference, Hamburg, Germany, 2011. view / link
Zahidur R. Chowdhury, A. Chutinan, Adel B. Gougam, Nazir P. Kherani and Stefan Zukotynski, “Two-dimensional modeling of the back amorphous-crystalline silicon heterojunction (BACH) photovoltaic device”, presented in Photonics North, published in the Proceedings of SPIE, vol. 7750, article no. 77502V, Niagara Falls, Canada, 2010. view / link
Zahidur R. Chowdhury, H. Liu, Nazir P. Kherani, and Stefan Zukotynski, “Back Amorphous-Crystalline Silicon Heterojunction (BACH) solar cell modelling study“, presented in Solar Building Research Network, Toronto, Canada, 2009. view / link