Influence of a front buffer layer on the performance of flexible Cadmium sulfide/Cadmium telluride solar cells

Cadmium telluride (CdTe) solar cells have been developing as a promising candidate for large-scale application of photovoltaic energy conversion and have become the most commercially successful polycrystalline thin-film solar module material. In scaling up from small cells to large-area modules, inevitably non-uniformities across the large area will limit the performance of the large cell or module. The effects of these non-uniformities can be reduced by introducing a thin, high-resistivity transparent buffer layer between the conductive electrodes and the semiconductor diode. ZnO is explored in this dissertation as a high-resistivity transparent buffer layer for sputtered CdTe solar cells and efficiencies over 15% have been achieved on commercially available Pilkington TEC15M glass substrates. The highest open-circuit voltage of 0.858V achieved using the optimized ZnO buffer layer is among the best reported in the literature. The properties of ZnO:Al as a buffer are also investigated. We have shown that ZnO:Al can serve both as a transparent conducting oxide layer as well as a high-resistivity transparent layer for CdTe solar cells. ZnO:Al reactively sputtered with oxygen can give the necessary resistivities that allow it to be used as a high-resistivity transparent layer. Glass is the most common choice as the substrate for solar cells fabricated in the superstrate configuration due to its transparency and mechanical rigidity. However flexible substrates offer the advantages of light weight, high flexibility, ease of integrability and higher throughput through roll-to-roll processing over glass. This dissertation presents significant improvements made to flexible CdTe solar cells reporting an efficiency of 14% on clear KaptonRTM flexible polyimide substrates. Our efficiency of 14% is, to our knowledge, the best for any flexible CdTe cell reported in literature.