Highly Absorbing, Flexible Solar Cells Created With Silicon Wire Arrays

Photomicrograph of a silicon wire array embedded within a transparent, flexible polymer film. (Caltech/Michael Kelzenberg)

Using arrays of long, thin silicon wires embedded in a polymer substrate, California Institute of Technology scientists have created a new type of flexible solar cell that enhances the absorption of sunlight and efficiently converts its photons into electrons. The solar cell uses a fraction of the expensive semiconductor materials required by conventional solar cells.

"These solar cells have, for the first time, surpassed the conventional light-trapping limit for absorbing materials," says Harry Atwater, professor of Applied Physics and Materials Science.

The light-trapping limit of a material refers to how much sunlight it is able to absorb. The silicon-wire arrays absorb up to 96 percent of incident sunlight at a single wavelength and 85 percent of total collectible sunlight. Atwater notes that the solar cells' enhanced absorption is "useful absorption."

"Many materials can absorb light quite well but not generate electricity —like, for instance, black paint," he explains. "What's most important in a solar cell is whether that absorption leads to the creation of charge carriers."

Schematic diagram of the light-trapping elements used to optimize absorption within a polymer-embedded silicon wire array. (Caltech/Michael Kelzenberg)

The silicon wire arrays created by Atwater and his colleagues are able to convert between 90 and 100 percent of the photons they absorb into electrons — meaning the wires have a near-perfect internal quantum efficiency. "High absorption plus good conversion makes for a high-quality solar cell," says Atwater.

The key to the success of these solar cells is their silicon wires, each of which, says Atwater, "is independently a high-efficiency, high-quality solar cell." When brought together in an array, they're even more effective because they interact to increase the cell's ability to absorb light.

"Light comes into each wire, and a portion is absorbed and another portion scatters. The collective scattering interactions between the wires make the array very absorbing," he says. This effect occurs despite the sparseness of the wires in the array — they cover only between 2 and 10 percent of the cell's surface area.

Each wire measures between 30 and 100 microns in length and only 1 micron in diameter. “The entire thickness of the array is the length of the wire,” notes Atwater. “But in terms of area or volume, just 2 percent of it is silicon, and 98 percent is polymer.”

While these arrays have the thickness of a conventional crystalline solar cell, their volume is equivalent to that of a two-micron-thick film. Since the silicon material is an expensive component of a conventional solar cell, a cell that requires just one-fiftieth of the amount of this semiconductor will be much cheaper to produce.

The composite nature of these solar cells means that they are also flexible. "Having these be complete flexible sheets of material ends up being important," Atwater says, "because flexible thin films can be manufactured in a roll-to-roll process, an inherently lower-cost process than one that involves brittle wafers, like those used to make conventional solar cells."

According to Atwater, the next steps are to increase the operating voltage and the overall size of the solar cell. "The structures we've made are square centimeters in size," he explains. "We're now scaling up to make cells that will be hundreds of square centimeters—the size of a normal cell."

(Caltech)