The annual energy yield of mono- and bifacial silicon heterojunction solar modules with high-index dielectric nanodisk arrays as anti-reflective and light trapping structures

TL;DR

This study evaluates the annual energy yield improvements of thin heterojunction silicon solar modules using TiO₂ nanodisk arrays for anti-reflective and light trapping purposes, demonstrating significant gains especially in bifacial configurations.

Contribution

It introduces optimized nanodisk array structures on HJT solar modules and quantifies their impact on energy yield under realistic conditions, a novel application at the module level.

Findings

Up to 11% relative increase in energy yield for monofacial modules.

Up to 43% relative increase for bifacial modules.

Significant performance enhancement with nanodisk arrays on thin silicon wafers.

Abstract

While various nanophotonic structures applicable to relatively thin crystalline silicon-based solar cells were proposed to ensure effective light in-coupling and light trapping in the absorber, it is of great importance to evaluate their performance on the solar module level under realistic irradiation conditions. Here, we analyze the annual energy yield of relatively thin heterojunction (HJT) solar module architectures when optimized anti-reflective and light trapping titanium dioxide (TiO$_2$) nanodisk square arrays are applied on the front and rear cell interfaces. Our numerical study shows that upon reducing crystalline silicon (c-Si) wafer thickness, the relative increase of the annual energy yield can go up to 11.0 %$_\text{rel}$ and 43.0 %$_\text{rel}$ for mono- and bifacial solar modules, respectively, when compared to the reference modules with flat optimized anti-reflective coatings of HJT solar cells.