Effect of Temperature on Photovoltaic Solar Cell Cadmium Telluride Thin Film

Abstract

Solar cell technology comes with unique temperature coefficients. These temperature coefficients are important and temperature of the solar cell has direct influence on the power output of a photovoltaic cells. CdTe is a very robust and chemically stable material and for this reason its related solar cell. Thin film photovoltaic technology is now the only thin film technology in the first top 10 producers in the world. The strong improvement in efficiency in the last 7 years was obtained by a new redesign of the CdTe solar cell device reaching a single solar cell. In this paper, we describe the fabrication process following the history of the solar cell as it was developed in the early years up to the latest development and changes. The configuration of fabricated cell is n-CdTe/NaOH (0.15 M) + S (0.15 M) + Na2S (0.15 M)/C(graphite). The junction ideality factor was found to be 2.63, 2.13, and 1.89. The flat band potential is found to be -0.400, -0.450, -0.501 V. The barrier height value was found to be 0.523, 0.487, and 0.436 eV. The study of power output characteristic shows open circuit voltage, short circuit current, fill factor and efficiency were found to be 120 mV, 24.2 μA, 32.68%, 26.18%, and 19.73% and 0.63%, 0.37%, and 0.23%, respectively. The lighted ideality factor was calculated and found to be 3.26, 1.87, and 1.17. Spectra attain maximum value of current at λ = 580 nm and decrease with increase in wavelength. The photovoltaic cell characterization of the thin films is carried out by studying current-voltage characteristics in dark, capacitance-voltage in dark, barrier height measurements, power output characteristics.