Assessment of Optical Properties of Metal Assisted Chemically Etched Black Silicon Surface Morphology in Multi-crystalline Cells and Modules by Ray-tracer Simulations

Abstract

Use of metal assisted chemically etched (MACE) diamond wire sawn multi-crystalline (mc-Si) wafers over conventional iso-textured slurry wire sawn wafers can significantly improve the performance of mc-Si solar cells at reduced production cost. Optimized MACE texturing processes produce inverted pyramid textures on DWS mc-Si wafers, which has improved the opto-electronic properties than iso-textured mc-Si wafers. Researchers have widely investigated the advantage of MACE inverted pyramid textures over iso-textures both at wafer level and cell level. However, its implication after module encapsulation is not yet explored. In this work, we attempt to assess the optical properties of inverted pyramid textures before and after module encapsulation, and the results are benchmarked against a reference iso-textured mc-Si module. Our simulation results suggest that adoption of inverted pyramid texture over iso-texture enhances the overall band to band absorption by 0.3% after module encapsulation.