Do sweep rate effects influence performance measurements of thin film solar cells?

This paper reports which solar cell devices are more susceptible to sweep rate effects, how the transient IV-curve differs from the steady state lV-curve and if results from large area pulsed solar simulators, such as the Spectrolab XT25 used in the European Solar Test Installation ESTI, are influenced by sweep rate effects. The paper reports the first results on single cell measurements made on crystalline silicon (c-Si), amorphous silicon (a-Si), cadmium telluride (CdTe) and copper indium gallium diselenide (CIGS) solar cells. It was observed that the error introduced by a pulsed simulator such as the one used at ESTI is less than the accuracy limit of the entire measurement set-up. The c-Si and a-Si cells show a considerable sweep dependency, but only if the I-V curve is traced by a negative sweep (from Voc to Isc) and at frequencies higher than 1.0 kHz. For positive sweeps the error introduced by the transient measurement system is negligible and in general all measured thin film technologies showed small errors