Investigation of Novel Silicon PV Cells of a Lateral Type

Solar cells made of single-crystalline silicon, as alternative energy sources, became the most widely used solar cells in recent years. The mainstream manufacturing approach is to process the cells and assemble these into photovoltaic (PV) modules. However, the direct conversion of solar energy into electricity using the PV effect suffers from low efficiency. Thus, increasing the conversion efficiency at low production costs becomes the main goal of solar cell manufacturers. One way to increase the efficiency of a solar cell is to use an ultra-wide layer of intrinsic semiconductor as the depletion region of a PN junction. In our work, we present a novel geometrical concept of PIN structure for PV applications. The width of the intrinsic layer in our construction is 5-20 mm. Moreover, in our novel structure, the light irradiation acts directly on the active region of the PV cell, which enables bi-facial irradiation and results in ∼28 % conversion efficiency. A low cost fabrication is ensured in our design due to a new manufacturing technology by eliminating some expensive processes, such as photolithography. The feasibility proof of the novel concept in mono-crystalline silicon solar cells is presented. We demonstrate simulation results and preliminary experimental results confirming our approach.