An aluminum substrate forms a template for a forest of cadmium sulfide nanopillars and also serves as a bottom electrode. (Berkeley Lab)
There's a new way to fabricate efficient solar cells from low-cost and flexible materials. The new design grows optically active semiconductors in arrays of nanoscale pillars - each a single crystal - with dimensions measured in billionths of a meter.

The process was demonstrated by researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California at Berkeley.

A solar cell’s basic job is to convert light energy into charge-carrying electrons and “holes” - the absence of an electron - which flow to electrodes to produce a current. Unlike a typical two-dimensional solar cell, a nanopillar array offers more surface for collecting light. Computer simulations have indicated that nanopillar semiconductor arrays should be more sensitive to light, have an enhanced ability to separate electrons from holes, and be a more efficient collector of these charge carriers.

“Unfortunately, early attempts to make photovoltaic cells based on pillar-shaped semiconductors grown from the bottom up yielded disappointing results. Light-to-electricity efficiencies were less than one to two percent,” says Ali Javey, a faculty scientist in Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division and a professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at UC Berkeley.

Javey devised a new, controlled way to use a method called the “vapor-liquid-solid” process to make large-scale modules of dense, highly ordered arrays of single-crystal nanopillars. Inside a quartz furnace, his group grew pillars of electron-rich cadmium sulfide on aluminum foil, in which geometrically distributed pores made by anodization served as a template.

A flexible solar cell is achieved by removing the aluminum substrate, substituting an indium bottom electrode, and embedding the 3-D array in clear plastic. (Berkeley Lab)
In the same furnace they submerged the nanopillars, once grown, in a thin layer of hole-rich cadmium telluride, which acted as a window to collect the light. The two materials in contact with each other form a solar cell, in which the electrons flow through the nanopillars to the aluminum contact below, and the holes are conducted to thin copper-gold electrodes placed on the surface of the window above.

The efficiency of the test device was measured at six percent, which is less than the 10 to 18 percent range of mass-produced commercial cells, but higher than most photovoltaic devices based on nanostructured materials – even though the nontransparent copper-gold electrodes on top of the group’s test device cut its efficiency by 50 percent. In the future, top contact transparency can easily be improved.

Other factors that greatly affect the efficiency of a 3-D nanopillar-array solar cell include its density and the exposed length of the pillars in contact with the window material. These dimensions can be optimized.

“There are lots of ways to improve 3-D nanopillar photovoltaics for higher performance, and ways to simplify the fabrication process as well, but the method is already hugely promising as a way to lower the cost of efficient solar cells,” says Javey. “There’s the ability to grow single-crystalline structures directly on large aluminum sheets. And the 3-D configuration means the requirements for quality and purity of the input materials are less stringent and less costly.”

(Berkeley Lab)