Effects of Anti-reflection Coating and Plasmonic Nanoparticle on the Performance Characteristics of Three Terminal Bipolar Transistor Architecture Based Solar Cell

The unavoidable complexities of multi-junction solar cell associated with surface recombination at the tunneling junction interfaces limit the applications of these solar cells. In this scenario, a transistor architecture based solar cell can overcome the limitation of surface recombination due to the absence of tunnel junction interfaces. The objective of this study is to enhance the efficiency of three-terminal heterojunction bipolar transistor architecture based solar cells (3T-HBTSC) and to move further towards green solar cells using kesterite materials. In this study, the performance parameters of 3T-HBTSC are thoroughly investigated to report the optimum size of anti-reflection (AR) layers and nanoparticles considering three configurations, (i) a single layer anti-reflection (AR) coating, (ii) double layer anti-reflection coating and (iii) plasmonic nanoparticle based 3T-HBTSC. The reflectivity of AR coatings and light trapping principles of plasmonic nanoparticles are the prime techniques upon which we relied to improve solar cell efficiency. We have found that the performance of double-layer anti-reflection coating (DLARC) configuration exceeds the record of the existing HBTSC with open circuit voltage of 736 mV, short circuit current density of 39.86 mA/cm
²
, efficiency of 22.41% and 76.41% fill factor.