Understanding the defect characteristics that occur near space-charge regions (SCRs) of kesterite (CZTSSe) solar cells is important because recombination loss at CZTSSe/CdS interface considered main cause their low efficiency. CZTSSe surfaces with different elemental compositions were formed without polishing (C00) and for 20 s (C20) 60 (C60). For C60, a specific region SCR was excessively Cu-r...

Abstract In order to analyze why the CIGS (CuInGaSe2) - based solar cells efficiency decrease for wide band gap (high Ga content), we have performed a series of samples by PVD using three stage process. The average compositions our range from x = 0 x = 0.88, as measured X-ray diffraction. An important feature this process is create double gradient into absorber, which contributes improve effici...

This work evaluated the capability of (electrochemical) impedance spectroscopy (IS, or ECIS as used here) to monitor damp heat (DH) stability of contact materials, CuInGaSe2 (CIGS) solar cell components, and devices. Cell characteristics and its variation of the CIGS devices were also examined by the ECIS. Bare and encapsulated sample sets were separately prepared and exposed in an environmenta...

A number of approaches have been developed to synthesize the CuInSe2 and CuInGaSe2 based thin film solar cells [1-6]. Due to large numbers of parameters involve in processing a solar cell such as the energy band gap of the back surface field, thickness of the emitter, interface density etc. It is a difficult task to scrutinize and control the effect of each variable on the performance of the so...

Thin film solar cells have reached commercial maturity and extraordinarily high efficiency that make them competitive even with the cheaper Chinese crystalline silicon modules. However, some issues (connected with presence of toxic and/or rare elements) are still limiting their market diffusion. For this reason new thin film materials, such as Cu2ZnSnS4 or SnS, have been introduced so that expe...

Cu(In,Ga)Se2 (CIGS)/CdS thin-film solar cells have reached, at laboratory scale, an efficiency higher than 22.3%, which is one of the highest efficiencies ever obtained for thin-film solar cells. The research focus has now shifted onto fabrication processes, which have to be easily scalable at an industrial level. For this reason, a process is highlighted here which uses only the sputtering tec...

This paper summarizes our work toward improving reproducibility in fabricating high efficiency absorbers and devices. This resulted in the fabrication of a CIGS cell with an efficiency of 21% under concentrated light. We compare devices fabricated with CdS and with Cd solution treatment alone. A high conversion efficiency of 15.7% is obtained with the latter, and we attribute this to the n-type...

Our goal is to develop novel growth approaches for producing low cost solar cells that have efficiency comparable to those made from high-cost, single-crystalline materials. Our efforts to date focus on using ion beam assisted deposition (IBAD) to control the grain boundary alignment in polycrystalline silicon thin films. The boundaries between highly aligned grains have smaller defect densitie...