Towards high-efficiency CZTS solar cell through buffer layer optimization

Farjana Akter Jhuma,Mohammad Junaebur Rashid,Marshia Zaman Shaily

doi:10.1007/s40243-019-0144-1

Farjana Akter Jhuma, Mohammad Junaebur Rashid + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1007/s40243-019-0144-1

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Abstract

Cu2ZnSnS4 (CZTS)-based solar cells show a promising performance in the field of sunlight-based energy production system. To increase the performance of CZTS-based solar cell, buffer layer optimization is still an obstacle. In this work, numerical simulations were performed on structures based on CZTS absorber layer, ZnO window layer, and transparent conducting layer n-ITO with different buffer layers using SCAPS-1D software to find a suitable buffer layer. Cadmium sulfide (CdS), zinc sulfide (ZnS) and their alloy cadmium zinc sulfide (Cd0.4Zn0.6S) were used as potential buffer layers to investigate the effect of buffer thickness, absorber thickness and temperature on open-circuit voltage (Voc), short-circuit current (Jsc), fill factor (FF) and efficiency (η) of the solar cell. The optimum efficiencies using these three buffer layers are around 11.20%. Among these three buffers, Cd0.4Zn0.6S is more preferable as CdS suffers from toxicity problem and ZnS shows drastic change in performance parameters. The simulation results can give important guideline for the fabrication of high-efficiency CZTS solar cell.

Highlights

The green, clean, renewable and sustainable energy source, sun has a very high potential to meet up the electricity demand of the world and the sunlight can directly be converted to electricity through solar cell using the principle known as photovoltaic (PV) effect
Numerical simulations were performed for CZTS solar cell using three different buffer layers such as Cadmium sulfide (CdS), zinc sulfide (ZnS), and C d0.4Zn0.6S and the performance parameters were observed by varying buffer layer thickness, absorber layer thickness and temperature
Among them the CdS buffer layer used in the CZTS solar cell exhibited higher efficiency (11.20%)

Summary

Introduction

The green, clean, renewable and sustainable energy source, sun has a very high potential to meet up the electricity demand of the world and the sunlight can directly be converted to electricity through solar cell using the principle known as photovoltaic (PV) effect. To obtain low cost and high-efficiency solar cell, researchers are working on many different solar materials such as Si, CdTe, Cu(In,Ga) Se2 (CIGS), C u2ZnSnS4 (CZTS), CZTSSe and organic resources [1, 2]. The most widely used Si-based solar cell exhibits high conversion efficiency (up to 24.5% at the University of New South Wales) [3]. It suffers from low throughput and high cost, could not affect the world’s energy. The material CZTS is a quaternary semiconductor with two different crystal structures stannite and kesterite.

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