Improving Solar Cell Efficiency with Surface Plasmons
Application Notes
This application note demonstrates how RSoft's Solar Cell Utility and FullWAVE can be used to evaluate the impact of metallic nanoparticles on solar cell performance. A two-cell multi-junction device with embedded nano-scale silver dots is simulated to observe this effect.
FullWAVE, based on the Finite-Difference Time-Domain (FDTD) algorithm, is used to compute the absorption spectrum of the device. This spectrum, combined with the incident solar spectrum, allows the number of absorbed photons to be calculated. RSoft's Solar Cell Utility then uses this data to compute the overall solar cell efficiency.
The simulation compares designs with and without silver nanoparticles. Results show a 40% efficiency improvement when nanoparticles are added, due to field enhancement effects. This example illustrates how surface plasmons can be used to improve solar cell performance and how RSoft tools enable accurate modeling of these effects.