Systematic analysis of diffuse rear reflectors for enhanced light trapping in silicon solar cells

Simple diffuse rear reflectors can enhance the light path length of weakly absorbed near infrared light in silicon solar cells and set a benchmark for more complex and expensive light trapping structures like dielectric gratings or plasmonic particles. We analyzed such simple diffuse rear reflectors systematically by optical and electrical measurements. We applied white paint, TiO2 nanoparticles, white backsheets and a silver mirror to bifacial silicon solar cells and measured the enhancement of the external quantum efficiency for three different solar cell geometries: planar front and rear side, textured front and planar rear side, and textured front and rear side. We showed that an air-gap between the solar cell and the reflector decreases the absorption enhancement significantly, thus white paint and TiO2 nanoparticles directly applied to the rear cell surface lead to the highest short circuit current density enhancements. The short circuit current density gains for a 200µm thick planar solar cell reached up to 1.8mA/cm2, compared to a non-reflecting black rear side and up to 0.8mA/cm2 compared to a high-quality silver mirror rear side. For solar cells with textured front side the short circuit current density gains are in the range between 0.5 and 1.0mA/cm2 compared to a non-reflecting black rear side and do not significantly depend on the angular characteristic of the rear side reflector but mainly on its absolute reflectance. •Systematic analysis of easy to fabricate diffuse rear reflectors for light trapping.•Combination of planar and textured surfaces investigated on final device level.•Current enhancement in bifacial crystalline silicon solar cells measured.•0.8mA/cm2 additional Jsc compared to silver mirror due to simple white paint.•The results are a benchmark for more complex light trapping structures.