Antireflection coatings on solar cells

✍ Scribed by B. Gandham; R. Hill; H.A. Macleod; M. Bowden

• Book ID: 103902792
• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 1979
• Weight: 817 KB
• Volume: 1
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0379-6787
• DOI: 10.1016/0379-6787(79)90003-6

✦ Synopsis

The effective refractive index of an assembly of films is derived from first principles via the Characteristic matrix and is used to find the conditions under which a solar cell can have minimum reflectance to normally incident radiation.

The characteristics of ideal antireflection coatings are calculated for Ag/Si Schottky barrier cells and it is found that the refractive index of an ideal single-layer coating increases as the thickness of the metal film increases.

The optimum parameters for Ag/p-Si cells antireflected by a single ZnS layer or by ZnS and cryolite layers are calculated for air mass 1 radiation and it is shown that multilayer coatings do not significantly improve the shortcircuit current.