Chemical bath deposited (CBD) ZnS buffer layer for CIGSS solar cells

Author

Kundu, Sambhu ; Olsen, Larry C.

Author_Institution

Electron. Mater. Lab, Washington State Univ./Tri-Cities, Richland, WA, USA

fYear

2002

fDate

19-24 May 2002

Firstpage

648

Lastpage

651

Abstract

Cadmium free buffer layers for Cu(In,Ga)S_xSe_2-x (CIGSS) thin film solar cells have been fabricated using a chemical bath deposition (CBD) technique. The purpose of this work was to replace the chemically deposited CdS buffer layer with an alternative non-cadmium buffer layer. In this study a major effort was made to improve quality of the ZnS buffer layers on 4cm² (2cm×2cm) CIGSS substrates. The use of CBD-ZnS layer, which is a higher band gap material than CBD-CdS, improved the quantum efficiency of the fabricated cells at short wavelengths, leading to a acceptable short circuit current (Jsc). The best cell yielded an active area efficiency of 13.3% on 0.42 cm² as measured by NREL.

Keywords

II-VI semiconductors; copper compounds; gallium compounds; indium compounds; liquid phase deposited coatings; semiconductor device measurement; solar cells; ternary semiconductors; wide band gap semiconductors; zinc compounds; 13.3 percent; CBD; CIGSS solar cells; Cu(InGa)SSe₂; ZnS; active area efficiency; buffer layer quality; cadmium free buffer layers; chemical bath deposited ZnS buffer layer; quantum efficiency; short circuit current; Area measurement; Buffer layers; Cadmium; Chemicals; Photonic band gap; Photovoltaic cells; Short circuit currents; Sputtering; Substrates; Zinc compounds;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Photovoltaic Specialists Conference, 2002. Conference Record of the Twenty-Ninth IEEE

ISSN

1060-8371

Print_ISBN

0-7803-7471-1

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/PVSC.2002.1190648

Filename

1190648