Silicon nitride as antireflection coating to enhance the conversion efficiency of silicon solar cells

The aim of this work is to investigate the effect of single and double layer antireflection coating (ARC) on the performance of silicon solar cells. In this regard, various previous works on single and double layer ARCs have been consulted. Silicon nitride (Si3N4) has been used as ARC material because of its varying refractive index (1.8-3.0). Numerical calculations have been performed to obtain the reflectance for single and double layer Si3N4 using the transfer matrix method. Double layer antireflection coating (DLARC) of Si3N4 is found to have significant advantages over single layer antireflection coating (SLARC). Calculated reflectances have been further used in the PC1D simulator as external reflectance files to study the performance of a silicon solar cell. As a result of the simulation, the reflectance is found to reduce from >30% to <2% with short circuit current of 3.86 mA/cm(2) and conversion efficiency of 20.22% for DLARC. Results obtained for DLARC were further compared with a reference cell (without ARC), a cell with SLARC, and a cell with zero reflectance on the front surface.