Reduction of optical losses in colored solar cells with multilayer antireflection coatings

Solar modules are becoming an everyday presence in several countries. So far, the installation of such modules has been performed without esthetic concerns, typical locations being rooftops or solar power plants. Building-integrated photovoltaic (BIPV) systems represent an interesting, alternative approach for increasing the available area for electricity production and potentially for further reducing the cost of solar electricity. In BIPV, the visual impression of a solar module becomes important, including its color. The color of a solar module is determined by the color of the cells in the module, which is given by the antireflection coating (ARC). The ARC is a thin film structure that significantly increases the amount of current produced by and, hence, the efficiency of a solar cell. The deposition of silicon nitride single layer ARCs with a dark blue color is the most common process in the industry today and plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition (PECVD) is mostly used for this purpose. However, access to efficient, but differently colored solar cells are important for the further development of BIPV. In this paper, the impact of varying the color of an ARC upon the optical characteristics and efficiency of a solar cell is investigated. The overall transmittance and reflectance of a set of differently colored single layer ARCs are compared with multilayered silicon nitride ARCs, all made using PECVD. These are again compared with porous silicon ARCs fabricated using an electrochemical process allowing for the rapid and simple manufacture of ARC structures with many tens of layers. In addition to a comparison of the optical characteristics of such solar cells, the effect of using colored ARCs on solar cell efficiency is quantified using the solar cell modeling tool PC1D. This work shows that the use of multilayer ARC structures can allow solar cells with a range of different colors throughout the visual spectrum to retain very high efficiencies.