A substantial and stable increase of the current density Jsc of ruthenium (Ru) dye sensitized solar cells (DSC) of up to 16.18% and of the power efficiency of up to 25.5% is demonstrated in this article via plasmonic enhancement. The key aspect of this work is the use of a tailored bimodal size distribution of functionalized gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) that have been chemically immobilized onto ...

The recent advances in photocatalysis have opened a variety of new possibilities for energy and biomedical applications. In particular, plasmonic photocatalysis using hybridization of semiconductor materials and metal nanoparticles has recently facilitated the rapid progress in enhancing photocatalytic efficiency under visible or solar light. One critical underlying aspect of photocatalysis is ...

Nanophotonic structures have attracted attention for light trapping in solar cells with the potential to manage and direct light absorption on the nanoscale. While both randomly textured and nanophotonic structures have been investigated, the relationship between photocurrent and the spatial correlations of random or designed surfaces has been unclear. Here we systematically design pseudorandom...

This work presents a theoretical study for the distribution of nanocomposite structure plasmonic thin-film solar cells through absorber layers. It can be reduced material consumption and cost cell. Adding nanometallic fillers in layer has been improved optical, electrical characteristics efficiency traditional thin film (ITO /CdS/PbS/Al SnO2/CdS/CdTe/Cu) models that using sub micro layer.  Also...

A simple optical model for photocurrent enhancement by plasmonic metal nanoparticles atop solar cells has been developed. Our model deals with the absorption, reflection, and scattering of incident sunlight as well as radiation efficiencies on metallic nanoparticles. Our calculation results satisfactorily reproduce a series of experimental spectral data for optically thin GaAs solar cells with ...

Neighboring metal nanoparticles influence photovoltaic and photocatalytic behavior of semiconductor nanostructures either through Fermi level equilibration by accepting electrons or inducing localized surface plasmon effects. By employing SiO(2)- and TiO(2)-capped Au nanoparticles we have identified the mechanism with which the performance of dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSC) is influenced by t...

this research reports a facile ultrasonic approach for the synthesis of iron vanadate (fevo4) nanoparticles with the aid of ammonium metavanadate (nh4vo3) and fe(no3)3.9h2o as the starting reagents without adding external surfactant, capping agent or template in an aqueous solution. furthermore, to examine the solar cell application of as-synthesized iron vanadate (fevo4) nanoparticles, fto/tio...

We report on the design, fabrication, and measurement of ultrathin film a-Si:H solar cells with nanostructured plasmonic back contacts, which demonstrate enhanced short circuit current densities compared to cells having flat or randomly textured back contacts. The primary photocurrent enhancement occurs in the spectral range from 550 nm to 800 nm. We use angle-resolved photocurrent spectroscopy...

A solar cell is an electronic device which not only harvests photovoltaic effect but also transforms light energy into electricity. In photovoltaic phenomenon, a P-N junction is created to form an empty region.  The presented paper aims at proposing a new highly efficient InGaN/Si double-junction solar cell structure. This cell is designed to be used in a real environmental situation, so only s...

A novel photoanode architecture with plasmonic silver (Ag) nanostructures embedded in titania (TiO2), which served as the wide band gap semiconducting support and CdS quantum dots (QDs), as light absorbers, is presented. Ag nanostructures were prepared by a polyol method and are comprised of clumps of nanorods, 15-35 nm wide, interspersed with globular nanoparticles and they were characterized ...