Fabrication and light capturing performance of stainless steel hollow fiber silicon solar cells

A stainless steel hollow fiber silicon solar cell was proposed in this work. The fabrication and light capturing performance (LCP) of this cell were investigated. The hollow fiber silicon solar cell was designed based on the light absorption principle of flat batteries and the light capture mechanism of a hollow waveguide. A cylindrical hollow fiber silicon battery was fabricated by rolling a flexible flat amorphous silicon thin film solar cell. The LCP of the hollow fiber cell was evaluated by comparing its photo-current and photo-voltage to a flat solar cell under the same light incident conditions. The photo-current and photo-voltage of the battery was measured under different light incidence angle and illumination intensity to reveal their influence on LCP. Results indicate that the hollow fiber can constraint the incident light in the hollow waveguide for repeated absorption and reflection to improve the LCP (~19.8%). The light incidence angle has great influence on the LCP and relatively high photo-current and photo-voltage can be obtained at the light incidence angle of 30°~50°. The photo-voltage goes up when the light intensity increases in the range of 0~100 000 lux, and gradually becomes a constant value if light intensity further increases. It is possible to improve LCP by rolling flexible planar silicon cells to form a hollow fiber structure. Higher LCP could be achieved via a hollow fiber silicon solar cell fabricated with a simple flat structured and low absorption thin film cell.