Hydrogenated Amorphous Silicon Solar Cells on Textured Flexible Substrate Copied From a Textured Glass Substrate Template

It is difficult to prepare textured surface on flexible substrate reproducibly for solar cell application. A novel method is developed that uses polyimide film to coat on a textured glass substrate as a template substrate and then peeled off as the flexible substrate. The surface morphology of the flexible substrate could faithfully reproduce the template as measured by atomic force microscopy. The hydrogenated amorphous silicon (a-Si:H) thin film solar cell was fabricated on the flexible substrate successfully. The results of I-V characteristics and spectral response confirm that the efficiency of textured solar cells increases as compared to that on a flat substrate. This technology will find application in making complicated reusable substrate for flexible electronics.