Improved Efficiency of Plasmonic Tin Sulfide Solar Cells

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that incorporating silver nanoparticles into tin sulfide solar cells enhances their efficiency by over 40% through improved light scattering and charge generation.

Contribution

The study introduces a plasmonic approach using silver nanoparticles in SnS solar cells, significantly boosting efficiency compared to traditional structures.

Findings

Over 40% efficiency improvement with Ag nanoparticles

Silver nanoparticles act as effective light scattering centers

Enhanced optical path length increases charge carrier generation

Abstract

Solar cells with the structure ITO-PEDOT:PSS-Ag:SnS-Al were fabricated with the active layer of tin sulphide with silver nano-particles (Ag:SnS) grown by thermal co-evaporation. To understand the influence of the silver nanoparticles on the energy conversion process, various cells with varying active layer thicknesses were compared. Results showed that the Ag nanoparticles act as scattering centers, resulting in longer optical path lengths for incident light. This in turn results in more charge carriers being generated and thus enhances the efficiency of the structure as compared to the pristine ITO-PEDOT:PSS-SnS-Al structure. The plasmonic solar cells of SnS showed an improvement of more than 40\%. The results are encouraging and suggests more concerted effort needs to be made on SnS.