Superior efficiency for homojunction GaAs solar cell

Abstract

This research presents a simulation study to achieve an optimized homojunction GaAs solar cell using SILVACO TCAD. A solar cell with configuration of p+-AlGaAs as window, p-GaAs as emitter, n-GaAs as base and n+-AlGaInP as BSF layer is proposed. The AlGaInP is selected as BSF layer due to high bandgap as compared to AlGaAs that is usually used in literature. Large scale of variation for doping concentration and thickness for all layers of cell have been simulated. The results show an improvement for solar cell parameters for the optimized cell as compared with the proposed one, where Jsc increases from 40.03 mA/cm2 to 52.58 mA/cm2, Voc slightly increases from 0.94 V to 1 V, Pmax increases from 30.8 mW/cm2 to 46.86 mW/cm2, FF increases from 82.19% to 88.54% and η increases from 22.29% to 33.94%. Which confirms the effectiveness of the doping concentration and thickness on solar cell performance.