Hybrid Solar Cells Based in Silicon Nanowires: Electronic Simulation and Optimization

This paper presents recent progress in computational modeling on blend morphology of silicon nanowires (SiNWs) dispersed in a conjugated polymer poly(3-hexylthiophene) P3HT hybrid solar cells. Mixtures of poly-(3-hexyl-thiophene) as electron-donor and silicon nanowires as electron-acceptor materials have been widely investigated. In this work, we extracted five parameters such as the ideality factor, the saturation current, the photocurrent, the series and the shunt resistances from measured current–voltage characteristics. These parameters are used in the simulation study to obtain the theoretical curves by using the Newton-Raphson method developed in MATLAB code. A good agreement is obtained between theoretical model and experimental measurement of electrical characteristics. Taking the advantage of the simulation study, we determined the solar cell parameters to study the effect of SiNWs concentration, the type of solvent used for film fabrication and the thickness of photoactive layer in the performance of ITO/PEDOT:PSS/P3HT:SiNWs/Al hybrid solar cells in target to achieve the optimal condition: 15% of SiNWs dispersed within P3HT matrix fabricated from THF solution and 115 nm thickness photoactive layer with fill factor FF and efficiency η equal to 48% and 0.08%, respectively.