Efficiency Improvement through Electro-Spraying Process of Hybrid SiO2-VO2 Anti-Reflection Coating for Monocrystalline Silicon Photovoltaic Cells

Utilizing the incident solar radiation into electrical energy through monocrystalline silicon solar cells has recently gained great interest in the field of advanced manufacturing. Reflection loss is a critical optical loss affecting solar cells performance. Through the process of antireflection coating, some of the scattered incident photons could be transmitted into the solar cells which leads to better utilization of incident light rays and improves efficiency. In the present work, antireflective materials such as SiO2, VO2 and SiO2-VO2 mixture films were coated over the silicon solar cell through an electro-spraying process. Characterization techniques such as XRD, AFM and FESEM were exploited to evaluate the efficiency of the electro-spraying process through the film’s crystalline properties, agglomeration formation and surface property of the films formed over the solar cells. The results demonstrated that SiO2-VO2 blended solar cell showed a minimum reflectance of 6.55% compared to bare cell. After coating the solar cell with SiO2-VO2, it exhibited higher power conversion efficiency of 24.87% under regulated environment. It acquires the narrow length of visible spectrum and serves as a yellow/green filter in visible spectrum. This electrosprayingprocess improves the capability of the cells to transmit the light as in sunlight with uniform radiation. It increased the photon transmission which reached the depletion region. The minimum resistivity of 5.37 × 10-3 Ω·cm was achieved when the electro-sprayingprocess applies a film of SiO2- VO2 blend on the cell, which is lower than all other samples. The electro-spraying process of SiO2- VO2 blend decreased reflection by reducing sunlight scattering.