Design of a high efficiency ultrathin CdS/CdTe solar cell using back surface field and backside distributed Bragg reflector

Abstract

A high efficiency CdS/CdTe solar cell was designed with a reduced CdTe absorber-layer thickness and a distributed Bragg reflector (DBR) as an optical reflector and a ZnTe layer as back surface field (BSF) layer. Simulation results showed that with combination of DBR and BSF layers and 0.3 µm thick CdTe, the conversion efficiency was increased about 3.2% as compared with a reference cell (with 4 µm thick CdTe layer). It was also shown that the efficiency can be increased up to 6.02% by using a long carrier lifetime in the absorber layer. Under global AM 1.5G conditions, the proposed cell structure had an open-circuit voltage of 1.062 V, a short-circuit current density of 24.64 mA/cm², and a fill factor of 81.3%, corresponding to a total area conversion efficiency of 21.02%.