Broadband photon harvesting capability enhancement with plasmonic inspired nanostructure based solar cell

Efficient light trapping in a solar cell can improve the overall performance and substantially reduce its cost. Even though thin-film photovoltaic (PV) offers significant cost reduction compared to traditional bulky thick film Photovoltaics, the overall performance is not optimal due to low absorption. Plasmonic light trapping techniques introduced recently in photovoltaics can provide better light absorption without increasing the device thickness. In this paper, we pro po se and demonstrate a simple plasmonic nanostructure based crystalline silicon (C-Si) solar cell by integrating the silver core with Silicon Nanowire (NW) to increase the overall absorption efficiency. We have found by numerical simulation and 3-D Electromagnetic modeling that for fixed filling ratio and length the proposed structure demonstrates 64% improvement in ultimate efficiency and current density compared to the conventional NW structures up to 300nm lattice constant.