Preparation And Characteristics Of The Pin-type Amorphous Silicon Solar Cells

As a inexhaustible and ecological pure resource, Solar energy becomes one of the most effective manners to solve the energy crisis and environmental pollution, So the exploitation and usage of solar energy become a matter of urgency. Currently, the most important mission is to reduce the cost of Photovoltaic (PV) systems, and the core of the technology to reduce the cost is to reduce material costs. By virtue of the superior material properties and the cheap cost, amorphous silicon thin solar cells no doubt become more potential than other solar cells.Amorphous silicon thin film solar cells have a lot of advantages such as large optical absorption coefficient, low substrate temperature, less consumption. Meanwhile, they can be deposited on cheap glass substrates, and the Manufacturing Process is compatible with existing integrated circuit technology for large-scale production. Furthermore, it's easy to combine amorphous silicon solar cells with the building materials to compose the Building Integrated Photovoltaic (BIPV) system.This paper reports the mathematical physical modeling and numerical simulation for the impact of i layer thickness to the performance of the solar cells with the structure of"TCO / p a-Si: H / i a-Si: H / n a-Si: H / metal", using Analysis of Microelectronics and Photonic Structures (AMPS) computer model developed at Penn State University, also the optimal design of i-layer is obtained .And then, the amorphous silicon thin film is deposited on glass by the way of RF-PECVD, combining with a series of semiconductor technologies such as vapor deposition and etching, the single junction pin amorphous silicon solar cell is fabricated on the Transparent conducting oxide (TCO) glass. Finally, the influences of fabrication process on the performance of multi-layer thin film are researched, especially for the processing conditions on the the photovoltaic properties. and the thickness of i-layer on the performance of cells. The main work can be briefed in the four respects as follows.1) The influences of the thickness of i-layer on the performance of p-i-n amorphous silicon solar cells are simulated, and the optimal device structures are designed. that is, the thickness of i-layer is about 500~700nm, and the conversion efficiency of cells is 3.4%.2) The influences of fabrication process on the performance of multi-layer thin film are researched, especially for the influences of processing condition on the optical and electrical properties of i-layer, the optimal process technologies for the deposition of multi-layer are obtained.3) The fabrications and performance tests of the single junction p-i-n solar celsl are accomplished.4) The influences of the thickness of i-layer on the performance of solar cells are researched, including VOC, JSC andη. The results show that, obtained in the present deposition system, the best thickness of i-layer is 800nm~1000nm. The maximum conversion efficiency of the battery is about 3.1% of the sample.The results are basically consistent with the simulation results, and verify the simulation results.