Anti-reflection effect of high refractive index polyurethane with different light trapping structures on solar cells

The textured surfaces to reduce light reflectivity by using acid-alkali chemical etching and SiNx films are generally necessary for commercial crystalline silicon solar cells. However, this etching process requires a large amount of environmentally harmful acid-alkali solution and has limited options for texture and size. To overcome these disadvantages, a new anti-reflection strategy is proposed in this study, which is using soft nanoimprint lithography to prepare the textured structures on the outside of the SiNx films. The polyurethane with a high refractive index of 1.64 is selected as the texture material, and different templates are selected to prepare it into different light trapping structures, including positive-inverted pyramids, inverted lace cones, and positive-inverted moth-eye nanostructures allowing for easy customization of the textured structures. The finite element simulation and experiments demonstrate that these light trapping structures have a wide spectrum anti-reflection performance in visible and near-infrared bands. With the back surface of the commercial passivated emitter rear contact (PERC) bi-facial solar cells as the imprint substrates, some light trapping structures can reduce the surface weighted average light reflectivity (Rw) at the band of 300–1200 nm from 18.31% to less than 10% and the optimal structures can reduce Rw to 8.71%. This anti-reflection strategy can also be applied to thin-film solar cells and crystalline silicon solar cells of other structures, such as HIT, Topcon, Perovskite/c-Si tandem, and so forth, which shows great development potential.