DESIGN AND ANALYSIS OF THE EFFICIENCY OF ZNO/GAAS AND ZNO/ALGAAS/SI-BASED SOLAR CELLS
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.35631/IJIREV.825031Keywords:
PC1D simulation, Solar cell, ZnO/AlGaAs/Si, ZnO/GaAsAbstract
The increasing demand for high efficiency solar cell device has continuous research into advanced semiconductor solar cell and optical enhancement techniques. The ZnO is a well-known and widely used material in photovoltaic (PV) industry due to its low cost, abundant material that offers high electron mobility, excellent transparency and wide bandgap. Although silicon (Si) is commonly paired with ZnO due to its superior performance, previous study has demonstrated that ZnO/GaAs solar cell structure exhibits good optoelectronic properties and higher theoretical conversion efficiency. Besides, the solar cell could be improved by widening the bandgap of the structures by forming a triple-heterojunction solar cell. The ZnO/AlGaAs/Si solar cell was proposed as a new design of the solar cell structures and numerically investigates to analyse the performance and the efficiency of the solar cell. However, research on this device structure remains limited compared with conventional solar cell. The device performance was evaluated by using Personal Computer 1-Dimensional (PC1D) simulation under the standard AM1.5G illumination, which 0.1W/cm2 and one-sun condition. The , , , fill factor (FF) and efficiency were used to evaluate the device performance. Compared to the ZnO/GaAs solar cell, the ZnO/AlGaAs/Si increased the electrical properties with from 3.253A to 3.870A, from 1.954W to 2.418W, and from 0.7130V to 0.7417V. This increment could increase the efficiency from 17.76% to 21.98%. These results can be attributed by the AlGaAs layer, which improves band alignment and increases photocurrent generation by allowing more incident photons to be transmitted to the silicon absorber due to its larger bandgap.
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