Simulation of High Efficiency Hit Solar Cell

Abstract

HIT (Heterojunction with Intrinsic Thin layer) solar cells have attracted growing attention among all Si based PV technologies because of their prospect of further improvisation of efficiency and cost reduction. A high efficiency a-Si:H (n)/a-Si:H (i)/c-Si (p)/uc-Si (p+) HIT solar cell is simulated and studied here. AFORS-HET simulation tool is used for simulation purpose. In this thesis, the I-V characteristics and energy band diagram of HIT cell are analyzed. The impacts of the variations of emitter, intrinsic layer and substrate thicknesses on the photovoltaic characteristics of solar cell are discussed. We have varied the emitter, the intrinsic layer and the substrate thicknesses and observed that only the substrate thickness variation affects the conversion efficiency significantly. The increase of substrate thickness leads to increase of efficiency. We have simulated our HIT structure using optimized values of thicknesses. With the optimized parameters combination, this HIT cell reaches a high performance with conversion efficiency (η) of 24.25%, fill factor (FF) of 85.73%, open circuit voltage (VOC) of 783.1 mV, and short circuit current density (JSC) of 36.12 mA/cm2.