Evaluation of the effectivenes of TiO2 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.