Flexible Solar Cells based on Curved Surface Nano-pyramids

The advent of ultrathin crystalline silicon (c-Si) solar cells has significantly reduced the cost of silicon solar cells by consuming less material. However, the very small thickness of ultrathin solar cells poses a challenge to the absorption of sufficient light to provide efficiency that is competitive to commercial solar cells. Light trapping mechanisms utilizing nanostructure technologies have been utilized to alleviate this problem. Unfortunately, a significant portion of light is still being lost even before entering the solar cells because of reflection. Different kinds of nanostructures have been employed to reduce reflection from solar cells, but reflection losses still prevail. In an effort to reduce reflection loss, we have used an array of modified nanostructures based cones or pyramids with curved sides, which matches the refractive index of air to that of silicon. Moreover, use of these modified nano-pyramids provides a quintic (fifth power) gradient index layer between air and silicon, which significantly reduces reflection. The solar cells made of such nanostructures not only significantly increase conversion efficiency at reduced usage of crystalline silicon material (e.g. thinner), but it also helps to make the c-Si based solar cell flexible. Design and optimization of flexible c-Si solar cell is presented in the paper.