Exploring optical properties of solar cells by programming and modeling

Abstract

One of the main factors influencing the efficiency of solar cells is their optical properties. So, most light is reflecting back and transmit through solar cell. This leads to a decrease in the efficiency. We know that the refractive index of silicon is 3-4 depending on the wavelength of light, and the refractive index of air is about 1. This causes to reflect 34 percentages of the incident light. To reduce the amount of reflected light, the surface of the solar cell should be covered with an anti-reflection layer. It is important to determine the conditions of the types and thicknesses of the material covering the surface of the solar cell. Semiconductor devices modeling has become very popular. Because the results obtained through modeling are very close to the experimental results. In this study, we also modeled the solar cell with and without an anti-reflective layer using the Sentaurus TCAD software package and presented the results obtained. A new program was developed using the C # programming language, and a library was developed to help new researchers study the optical properties of solar cells directly for that program, and a number of results were obtained.