Achieving 45% efficiency of CIGS/CdS Solar Cell by adding GaAs using optimization techniques

TL;DR

This study demonstrates that incorporating a GaAs layer into a CIGS/CdS solar cell architecture, optimized via simulation, can achieve a record efficiency of 45.7%, surpassing conventional designs.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel three-layered GaAs/CIGS/CdS solar cell architecture optimized through numerical simulation for enhanced efficiency.

Findings

Achieved a maximum PCE of 45.7% with optimized GaAs layer.

Optimized thickness and carrier density significantly improve performance.

Simulation results suggest potential for high-efficiency solar cells.

Abstract

This paper proposes an efficient three-layered p-GaAs/p-CIGS/n-CdS (PPN), a unique solar cell architecture. Copper indium gallium selenide (CIGS)-based solar cells exhibit substantial performance than the ones utilizing cadmium sulfide (CdS). On the contrary, CIGS-based devices are more efficient, considering their device performance, environmentally benign nature, and reduced cost. Therefore, our paper proposes a numerical analysis of the homojunction PPN-junction GaAs solar cell structure along with n-ZnO front contact that was simulated using the Solar Cells Capacitance Simulator (SCAPS-1D) software. Moreover, we investigated optimization techniques for evaluating the effect of the thickness and the carrier density on the performance of the PPN layer on solar cell architecture. Subsequently, the paper discusses the electronic characteristics of adding GaAs material on the top of the conventional (PN) junction, further leading to improved values of the parameters, such as the power conversion efficiency (PCE), open-circuit voltage (VOC), fill factor (FF) and short-circuit current density (JSC) of the solar cell. The most promising results of our study show that adding the GaAs layer using the optimised values of thickness as 5 ({\mu}m) and carrier density as 1*1020 (1/cm) will result in the maximum PCE, VOC, FF, and JSC of 45.7%, 1.16V, 89.52% and 43.88 (mA/m2), respectively, for the proposed solar cell architecture.