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  • PVT&P 15 Nov 2012

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    Shalini Jain
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    Thin film solar cells have several advantages over traditional silicon wafer cells including lower material consumption, shorter payback periods, the ability to create larger and more flexible modules, and the potential for multi-junction cells that can harness more of the solar spectrum. However, thin film cells also have lower efficiencies on average due to structural defects. Common thin film materials include amorphous silicon, cadmium telluride, and copper indium selenide which have favorable band gaps and absorption coefficients for solar energy conversion. Physical vapor deposition and chemical vapor deposition are common techniques for depositing thin films.

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    Thin film solar cells have several advantages over traditional silicon wafer cells including lower material consumption, shorter payback periods, the ability to create larger and more flexible modules, and the potential for multi-junction cells that can harness more of the solar spectrum. However, thin film cells also have lower efficiencies on average due to structural defects. Common thin film materials include amorphous silicon, cadmium telluride, and copper indium selenide which have favorable band gaps and absorption coefficients for solar energy conversion. Physical vapor deposition and chemical vapor deposition are common techniques for depositing thin films.

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    11 views4 pages

    PVT&P 15 Nov 2012

    Uploaded by

    Shalini Jain
    Thin film solar cells have several advantages over traditional silicon wafer cells including lower material consumption, shorter payback periods, the ability to create larger and more flexible modules, and the potential for multi-junction cells that can harness more of the solar spectrum. However, thin film cells also have lower efficiencies on average due to structural defects. Common thin film materials include amorphous silicon, cadmium telluride, and copper indium selenide which have favorable band gaps and absorption coefficients for solar energy conversion. Physical vapor deposition and chemical vapor deposition are common techniques for depositing thin films.

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    THIN FILM SOLAR CELLS

    Thin film refers to random nucleation and growth process of individually condensing/ reacting atomic/ ionic/ molecular species on a substrate. The structural, chemical, metallurgical, and physical properties of such films strongly depend upon the deposition parameters of the film.

    Advantages of thin film technology


    1. Low material consumption 2. Shorter pay back period

    3. Monolithic integration: It refers to the process in which the solar cells are connected in series during their fabrication to make a module. Most thin film technologies offer the possibilities of monolithic integration.

    4. Large area modules - Si wafers are limited to maximum size of 150 mm x 150 mm (225 cm2) size although large area thin film modules as large as 57000 cm2 are being fabricates.
    5. Tunable material properties opens possibility of multijunction solar cell for harnessing larger portion of the solar cell. 6. Low temperature processing 7. Transparent modules can be made

    Disadvantages:
    1. Low solar cell efficiency which results mainly because of structure deviations of thin films. 2. Structural defects may result into poor stability of the material.

    Materials for Thin Film Technology


    1. Band gap should be between 1 to 1.5 eV.

    2. The absorption coefficient of the material should be high i.e. about 104 cm-1 to 106 cm-1.
    3. Recombination rate should be low.

    4. Diffusion length should be high.


    5. Materials Should be widely available, reproducible, and nontoxic.

    Materials fulfilling above requirements are: Si (though indirect band gap material, CdTe, CuISe2. Later two are direct band gap semiconductors. CdTe, CuISe2 offer advantages as their internal surface and external surfaces are well passivated unlike silicon surfaces due to which they have better efficiency.

    Other materials: III-V group like GaAs, InP, InGaAs, and similar compounds have direct band gap and they ideally suit for thin film solar cells however, they are expensive. Their main application is in space and concentrator solar cells.

    Thin film deposition techniques:


    1. Physical Vapor Deposition (PVD) Evaporation

    Sputtering
    Molecular beam epitaxy (MBE)

    2. Chemical Vapor Deposition (CVD) Low pressure CVD (LPCVD) and Atmospheric pressure CVD
    Plasma enhanced CVD (PECVD) Liquid Phase Epitaxy

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