A High Efficiency Ultrathin CdTe Solar Cell for Nano-Area Applications

Abstract

Due to limited availability and the rising price of telluride, the biggest challenge in solar Photo-voltaic (PV) is to successfully design and fabricate optimized CdTe solar cells with reducing the cell thickness that show simultaneously high efficiency and current density. A novel structure of ultrathin CdTe solar cells is proposed in this paper that focuses on conversion efficiency. This structure achieved by rotating 90o in the base line structure that suggests high efficiency due to the high current density. The result showed a considerable improvement over the 15% efficiency of the reference solar cell. The proposed structure is quite noteworthy in reducing the amount of material used and associated losses. Under global air mass (AM) 1.5 conditions, an open-circuit voltage (Voc) of 866 mV, a short-circuit current density (Jsc) of 74.84 mA/cm2, and a fill factor (FF) of 48.2% were obtained corresponding to a conversion efficiency of 31.2%.