Effects of Mechanical Damage and Temperature on the Electrical Performance of CIGS Thin-Film Solar Cells

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the effect of mechanical damage and temperature on copper indium gallium diselenide (CIGS) thin-film solar cells through experiments and modeling. After generating mechanical damage on CIGS solar cell with 20% increments, the electrical performance was measured (current–voltage curve) while temperature was varying from 10 to 70 °C at 20° increments. Other measured values are open-circuit voltage ( V oc), fill factor (ff), maximum power ( P max). Those electrical values ( V oc, ff, P max) are found as a function of temperature and percent damage. Moreover, the parameters of the single diode solar cell model were obtained as a function of temperature and percentage damage: light generation current ( IL ), saturation current ( I0 ), shunt resistance ( R sh), and series resistance ( R s ). Our paper contributes to the deeper understanding of the concurrent effect of temperature and mechanical damage to solar cells.