Abstract
We fabricated 1-D and 2-D diffraction gratings of SiOx anti-reflection (AR) film grown on a quartz substrate and integrated them into a c-Si photovoltaic (PV) submodule. The light-trapping effect of the resulting submodules was studied in terms of the oblique optical incident angle, ${\theta}_i$. As the ${\theta}_i$ increased, solar conversion efficiency, ${\eta}$, was improved as expected by the increased optical transmission caused by the grating. For ${\theta}_i{\leq}30^{\circ}$, the relative solar conversion efficiency, ${\Delta}{\eta}$, of a 1-D SiOx (t=300 nm) grating, compared to that of a flat SiOx AR-coated integrated PV submodule, was improved very little, with a small variation of within 2%, but increased markedly for ${\theta}_i{\geq}40^{\circ}$. We observed a change of ${\Delta}{\eta}$ as large as 10.7% and 9.5% for the SiOx grating of period t=800 nm and 1200 nm, respectively. For a 2-D SiOx (t=300 nm) grating integrated PV submodule, however, the optical trapping behavior was similar in terms of ${\theta}_i$ but its variation was small, within ${\pm}1.0%$.