The German-Turkish project RainbowEnergy: A Si-based nanocomposite absorber for thin film PV cells

Si-based thin film PV cells suffer from a rather low efficiency. This leads to a relative small market share, although their module prices are comparably low. RainbowEnergy aims at a novel nanostructured Si-based thin film PV cell absorber, which increases the efficiency substantially without increasing the module costs. Large-scale patterning by spontaneous self-structuring during spinodal decomposition of metastable SiO is a
promising synthesis process of nanostructured Si absorbers for 3rd generation thin-film solar cells. The SiO layers have been produced by different techniques, sputtering, CVD and e-beam evaporation. Spinodal decomposition has been activated by Rapid Thermal Processing (RTP, several seconds), very Rapid Thermal Processing (vRTP, dwell time tens of msec), and laser annealing. If after phase separation SiOx --> 0.5SiO2 + (1-0.5x)Si the volume fraction of Si exceeds ~30%, then Si forms a percolated nanowire network. Energy-Filtered Transmission Electron Microscopy (EFTEM) studies show that nanowires have diameters of a few nanometers with a narrow distribution. This is in excellent agreement with large-scale simulations based on kinetic Monte-Carlo. As the wire diameters coarsens with time of heat treatment like d~t1/3, and because the Si bandgap opens for nmstructures by quantum confinement, a band gap engineering for PV cell optimization becomes feasible. It will be shown that up-scaling of the nanotechnology described above to large-scale PV cell production is under way with industrial partners