Effect of surface recombination velocity (SRV) on the efficiency of silicon solar cell

Surface recombination velocity is an important parameter which strongly impacts the overall performance of the solar cell. A high surface recombination velocity causes the creation of dead layer. The rate of photo generated carriers reduces due to higher surface recombination velocity (SRV). The impact of front and back surface recombination velocities on the important characteristics (namely short circuit current (I-sc), open circuit voltage (V-oc), conversion efficiency (eta) and fill factor FF) of solar cell were investigated by Personal Computer One Dimension (PC1D) simulation software. Higher recombination rate of carriers due to high SRV provide a detrimental impact on the I-sc of solar cell. It was noticed that increase in surface recombination rate, the carrier starts to recombine at defected surface there by reducing the performance of the solar cell. The simulation results show that both internal and external quantum efficiency of solar cells reduces drastically with increasing the front and back SRV. The enhancement in efficiency because of the reduction in back SRV is prominent if the junction is shallower and cell thickness is smaller. There are limited advantages of the lower back SRV due to the recombination losses in the front region and front SRV value. The maximum efficiency is coming at FSRV of 100cm/s i.e. 16.33%.