High efficiency amorphous triple-junction thin-film SiGe solar cells incorporating multi-trench region

This paper presents a new amorphous triple-junction thin-film SiGe solar cell design enhancing the power efficiency for high performance photovoltaic applications. To do that, a new approach based on multi-trench technique to improve the electrical performance, which are the electrical efficiency and fill factor, is presented and discussed. The key idea behind this contribution is to introduce new multi-trench region in the intrinsic layer of the top sub-cell, in order to modulate the electrical behavior, total resistance, of the triple-junction solar cell. The numerical calculations demonstrate that, according to the trench size effects on both series resistance and shunt resistance, the fill factor and electrical efficiency values are strongly related to the number and structure of the trenches. To justify the validity of our design suitable for implementation in photovoltaic system and solar cell simulators, the obtained results are compared with the available research data and they shows a satisfactory improvement, consequently, demonstrating the efficiency of our design.