The effect of small pyramid texturing on the enhanced passivation and efficiency of single c-Si solar cells

In this work, a simple method to form small random pyramid texturing (0.5-2 μm size) is proposed to enhance the surface passivation of commercial p-type Cz-Si wafers. Small pyramid texturing was generated with chemical nano-masking for anisotropic etching. The surface recombination velocity obtained after the passivation of the thermal oxide layer reduced from 65 and 10 cm s −1 for the large pyramids (10-15 μm size) and small pyramid (0.5-2 μm) texturing respectively. The solar cell fabricated with large pyramid texturing resulted in an efficiency of 17.82% with a current density ( J SC ) of 36.91 mA cm −2 , an open circuit voltage ( V OC ) of 620 mV whereas small pyramid texturing resulted in an efficiency of 18.5% with J SC of 37.6 mA cm −2 and V OC of 628 mV. The low surface recombination velocity increases the V OC by 8 mV. The small pyramid textured wafers are found to enhance the quantum efficiency performance in both short and long wavelength regions. In this work, small random pyramid texturing (0.5-2 μm size) was generated with chemical nano-masking, to enhance the surface passivation of commercial p-type Cz-Si wafers.