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Large-Area Si Solar Cells Based on Molybdenum Oxide Hole Selective Contacts

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Abstract

Carrier selective contacts based heterojunction Si solar cells are an emerging photovoltaic technology. This paper reports the fabrication of large area Si solar cells based on molybdenum oxide (MoOx) thin films as hole selective contacts. Carrier selective contacts (CSC) allow the passage of only one type of charge carrier (electron or hole). Solar cell structures Ag/ITO/MoOx/c-Si/Al with MoOx film thickness of ~15 nm and ~ 25 nm were successfully fabricated over a large area of ~3 cm2. The best results were obtained with the cell having 15 nm MoOx thickness, which showed an efficiency of 2.89% with 30.27 mA/cm2 as the short-circuit photocurrent. With the optimized MoOx film thickness of 15 nm, a large area cell was fabricated on a 2-in. diameter n-Si wafer with an active area of 11.68 cm2. The full wafer cell showed a short-circuit photocurrent of 35.15 mA/cm2, and an open-circuit voltage of 360 mV. The external quantum efficiency of the full wafer cell was measured at multiple points and no noticeable difference was observed. This indicated the uniformity of the large-area MoOx films.

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Data Availability

All the data supporting the findings of this work are available in the manuscript.

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Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge financial support through DST-INSPIRE Faculty Award research grant DST/INSPIRE/04/2015, and DST Nanomission grant DST/NM/NT/2018/146. Financial support through research initiation grant (RIG) of IIT Bhilai is also acknowledged.

Funding

This work was supported by DST-INSPIRE Faculty Award research grant DST/INSPIRE/04/2015, and DST Nanomission grant DST/NM/NT/2018/146. Financial support through research initiation grant (RIG) of IIT Bhilai is also acknowledged.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Indian Institute of Technology Bhilai, GEC Campus, Sejbahar, Raipur, Chhattisgarh, 492015, India

    Manas R. Samantaray, Tushar Chichkhede & Nikhil Chander

  2. Department of Physics, Indian Institute of Technology Bhilai, GEC Campus, Sejbahar, Raipur, Chhattisgarh, 492015, India

    Dhriti S. Ghosh

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  1. Manas R. Samantaray
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  2. Tushar Chichkhede
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  3. Dhriti S. Ghosh
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  4. Nikhil Chander
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Contributions

Manas R. Samantaray: Original Draft preparation, Nikhil Chander: Conceptualization, Nikhil Chander and Dhriti S. Ghosh: Validation and Investigation. Manas R. Samantaray, Tushar Chichkhede: methodology. Manas R. Samantaray and Tushar Chichkhede: Data curation, Nikhil Chander: Supervision, Review and Editing. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Manas R. Samantaray or Nikhil Chander.

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Samantaray, M.R., Chichkhede, T., Ghosh, D.S. et al. Large-Area Si Solar Cells Based on Molybdenum Oxide Hole Selective Contacts. Silicon 14, 10263–10270 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12633-022-01743-2

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