CdTe Solar Cells: The Role of Copper

Conference · Fri Jun 06 00:00:00 EDT 2014

OSTI ID:1169766

Guo, Da ^[1]; Akis, Richard ^[1]; Brinkman, Daniel ^[1]; Sankin, Igor ^[2]; Fang, Tian ^[2]; Vasileska, Dragica ^[1]; Ringhofer, Christain ^[1]

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1. Arizona State University
2. First Solar

In this work, we report on developing 1D reaction-diffusion solver to understand the kinetics of p-type doping formation in CdTe absorbers and to shine some light on underlying causes of metastabilities observed in CdTe PV devices. Evolution of intrinsic and Cu-related defects in CdTe solar cell has been studied in time-space domain self-consistently with free carrier transport and Poisson equation. Resulting device performance was simulated as a function of Cu diffusion anneal time showing pronounced effect the evolution of associated acceptor and donor states can cause on device characteristics. Although 1D simulation has intrinsic limitations when applied to poly-crystalline films, the results suggest strong potential of the approach in better understanding of the performance and metastabilities of CdTe photovoltaic device.

• Research Organization: Arizona State Univ., Tempe, AZ (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE)
• Contributing Organization: Arizona State University
• DOE Contract Number: EE0006344
• OSTI ID: 1169766
• Report Number(s): DOE-ASU-0006344-4
• Resource Relation: Conference: 17th International Workshop on Computational Electronics, Paris, France, 3-6 June 2014
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

14 SOLAR ENERGY