David, C.; Koduvelikulathu, L.J.; Kopecek, R. Comparative Simulations of Conductive Nitrides as Alternative Plasmonic Nanostructures for Solar Cells. Energies2021, 14, 4236.
David, C.; Koduvelikulathu, L.J.; Kopecek, R. Comparative Simulations of Conductive Nitrides as Alternative Plasmonic Nanostructures for Solar Cells. Energies 2021, 14, 4236.
David, C.; Koduvelikulathu, L.J.; Kopecek, R. Comparative Simulations of Conductive Nitrides as Alternative Plasmonic Nanostructures for Solar Cells. Energies2021, 14, 4236.
David, C.; Koduvelikulathu, L.J.; Kopecek, R. Comparative Simulations of Conductive Nitrides as Alternative Plasmonic Nanostructures for Solar Cells. Energies 2021, 14, 4236.
Abstract
Particle layers employing conductive transition metal nitrides have been proposed as possible alternative plasmonic materials for photovoltaic applications due to their reduced losses compared to metal nanostructures. We critically compare the photocurrent gain due to an additional layer made of nanopillars of nitrides with other material classes obtained in an already highly optimized doped c-Si baseline solar cell with accurate doping profile from measurements. A relative photocurrent gain with respect to the baseline cell of on average 5% to 10% is observed, with a few cases achieving around 30% gain. While the local field enhancement is moderate resonances for nitrides spread over the whole UV-VIS range. For some nitrides, the shading effect remains a problem similar as for metals, but others behave more like dielectric scatterers with high photocurrent gain.
Keywords
theory and simulation; conductive transition metal nitrides; nanostructures; solar cells
Subject
Physical Sciences, Optics and Photonics
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
