Potential of zinc oxide nanowhiskers as antireflection coating in crystalline silicon solar cell for cost effectiveness

Antireflection coatings play an important role in enhancing the performance of crystalline silicon solar cells by increasing the light coupling into the active region of the devices. In this work we investigated the effects of seed layer thickness and growth time on the reflection properties of solution-grown zinc oxide nanowhiskers. Our results reveal the potential of zinc oxide nanowhiskers as antireflection coating in crystalline silicon solar cells as investigated herein. With this efficient antireflection coating, we have presented a hierarchical structure integrating zinc oxide nanowhisker arrays on silicon micropyramids for improving the energy conversion efficiency. This structure displays broadband reflection suppression in the 300–1200 nm range, with an integrated reflectance of 2.28%. A conversion efficiency of 13.3% was obtained, which is significantly high for large area (3″ × 3″) solar cell fabricated using zinc oxide nanowhiskers as the antireflection coating layer.