Development of Numerical Method for Optimizing Silicon Solar Cell Efficiency

Abstract

This paper presents a development of numerical method to determine and optimize the photocurrent densities in silicon solar cell. This method is based on finite difference algorithm to resolve the continuity and Poisson equations of minority charge carriers in p-n junction regions by using Thoma’s algorithm to resolve the tridiagonal matrix. These equations include several physical parameters as the absorption coefficient and the reflection one of the material under the sunlight irradiation of AM1.5 solar spectrum. In this work, we study the effect of various parameters such as thickness and doping concentration of the (emitter, base) layers on crystalline silicon solar cell perfomance. The obtained results show that the optimum energy conversion efficiency is 22.16 % with the following electrical parameters solar cell Voc = 0.62 V and Jph = 43.20 mA · cm – 2. These results are compared with experimental data and show a good agreement of our developped method.