Investigation of the Effect of Using Plasmonic Properties of Silver Nano-Particle on Increasing the Absorption of Thin-Film Solar Cells with 3D Simulation

In this paper, a thin layer silicon solar cell device including metallic nanostructures is designed and studied to improving the performance and absorption of cellular light. First, a flat solar cell structure was studied and a light absorption spectrum was obtained for it. Then spherical nanoparticles and metallic silver nanostructures were embedded in the absorbent layer of the solar cell. The results show that the presence of nanostructures causes the collision of light in the designed solar cells to be concentrated. In this case, optical resonance increases due to the interaction of light input with metal nanoscale structures and causes light to propagate on a common metal and semiconducting surface, which is the same phenomenon of localized polariton plasmon. Simulation results that done with three dimensional finite difference time domain (FDTD) method, show a cellular efficiency of about 35%, Jsc is approximately 36.2 mA/cm2 and fill factor is about 42.6%.