Annual energy yield of mono- and bifacial silicon heterojunction solar modules with high-index dielectric nanodisk arrays as anti-reflective and light trapping structures

While various nanophotonic structures applicable to relatively thin crystalline silicon-based solar cells were proposed to ensure effective light in-coupling and light trapping in the absorber, it is of great importance to evaluate their performance on the solar module level under realistic irradiation conditions. Here, we analyze the annual energy yield of relatively thin (crystalline silicon (c-Si) wafer thickness between 5 mu m and 80 mu m) heterojunction (HJT) solar module architectures when optimized anti-reflective and light trapping titanium dioxide (TiO2) nanodisk square arrays are applied on the front and rear cell interfaces, respectively. Our numerical study shows that upon reducing c-Si wafer thickness down to 5 mu m, the relative increase of the annual energy yield can go up to 23.3 %(rel) and 43.0%(r)(el) for mono- and bifacial solar modules, respectively, when compared to the reference modules with flat optimized anti-reflective coatings of HJT solar cells. (C) 2021 Optical Society of America under the terms of the OSA Open Access Publishing Agreement