Coupling Organic and Inorganic Luminescent Concentrator for Solar Cells: A New Method to Optimize Energy from Sun

The purpose of this work is to study the influence of increasing the efficiency of a silicon solar cell by introducing a new method. This method includes coupling both inorganic and organic luminescent solar concentrator to a silicon solar cell. First, a chemical etching to the emitter of solar cells is obtained by using HF solution in order to form porous silicon (inorganic solar concentrator), usually known as stain-etched PS. This process may increase the surface area directed to the incoming solar radiation. In addition, it provides an antireflection coating (AR) to the cell surface, where the high refractive index of Silicon (used in manufacturing the silicon solar cells) at solar wavelengths creates large reflection losses that must be compensated for by applying antireflective coatings. Then we applied a thin layer of organic dye as an organic Luminescent Solar Concentrator (LSC) on the top of the cell to increase the absorption window from incident light, in order to get the advantage of potential band gap tuning, via light trapping. The control bare cell has efficiency of (11%), but obtained efficiency enhancement of the cell with dye (13.6%), the etched cell (18.7), and etched and dyed cell (23.8%).