All‐Angle Invisibility Cloaking of Contact Fingers on Solar Cells by Refractive Free‐Form Surfaces

2017/07/04 by Martin Schumann, Malte Langenhorst, Michael Smeets +3 · 2 citations
Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #Near-Field Optical Microscopy #Photonic Crystals and Applications #Photonic and Optical Devices #Cloaking #Materials science #Solar cell #Optoelectronics #Optics #Polymer solar cell #Silicon #Energy conversion efficiency #Photonics #Metamaterial

paper · doi:10.1002/adom.201700164

openalex publication_date 2017/07/04 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28

Abstract

This work demonstrates a performance improvement of state‐of‐the‐art silicon solar cells by cloaking their metal contact fingers. The cloaking free‐form surfaces are fabricated on silicon heterojunction solar cells using direct laser writing of polymers and subsequent soft imprinting. Cloaking performance is determined experimentally by measuring spatially resolved and angle‐resolved current generation and the spectral response of the cell. The short‐circuit current density of the cell increases by 7.3%; its power‐conversion efficiency is enhanced by 9.3%. Overcompensation of the shadowing loss is found to be caused by improved light‐gathering and light‐trapping in the polymer layer. The experimental findings are in good agreement to ray‐tracing simulations.

Citations

• Diffractive optical elements utilized for efficiency enhancement of photovoltaic modules
• Light management for reduction of bus bar and gridline shadowing in photovoltaic modules
• Increasing light capture in silicon solar cells with encapsulants incorporating air prisms to reduce metallic contact losses

Cited by

• Polymer Encapsulants Incorporating Light‐Guiding Architectures to Increase Optical Energy Conversion in Solar Cells
• Solar cell [wikipedia]

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• Increasing light capture in silicon solar cells with encapsulants incorporating air prisms to reduce metallic contact losses