Evaluation of the effectivenes of TiO 2 antireflection coating for solar cell

Abstract

This study presents the effects of anti-reflection coating (ARC) thickness and operating temperature on the reflectance, open circuit voltage, short circuit current and efficiency of GaAs solar cells with and without TiO2 ARC. The work is conducted in the COMSOL Multi-physics environment where the semiconductor and electromagnetic wave frequency model were implemented. The results showed that, the ARC thickness at 80nm is able to reducing the reflectance from 32% to 5%, which led to the overall efficiency of the solar cell to increase from 19% to 25%. Moreover, at high temperature of 70℃ the thermal voltage and the rate of charge recombination increase leading to decrease in the open circuit voltage from 1.030V to 1.015V resulting in the decrease of efficiency to 23%. The effectiveness of the ARC in enhancing the solar cell efficiency is clearly illustrated in this work. Thus, more efficient panels can be manufactured with the use of ARC.