Towards the enhanced efficiency of ultrathin Sb2Se3 based solar cell with cubic silicon carbide (3C–SiC) buffer layer

Abstract

Antimony selenide (Sb2Se3) is a sustainable candidate for renewable energy production. Photovoltaic cells based on Sb2Se3 has grown worldwide interest and attention due to its low cost and outstanding conversion efficiency. Cubic silicon carbide (3C–SiC) is an optimistic material as buffer layer which replacing toxic cadmium sulfide (CdS) and has a large bandgap. We investigate numerically the performance of Sb2Se3 based n-SnO2/n-3C–SiC/p-Sb2Se3 heterojunction solar cell by employing (SCAPS-1D) (one dimensional solar cell capacitance simulator) software. The impact of buffer/absorber layer width, donor/acceptor densities, and operating temperature on device performance is analyzed. Accordingly, the defects come across in p- Sb2Se3 and n-3C–SiC layers along with the role of n-3C–SiC/p-Sb2Se3 interface defects density have been analyzed in detail to deliver guidelines for obtaining optimum efficiency. The anticipated structure offers the maximum efficiency of 23.9% under condition of illumination spectrum of 1.5G. Photovoltaic device performance parameters such as Jsc, Voc, QE, FF and efficiency of the devices have been examined graphically. The optimized structure may have significant impact on future development of advanced photovoltaic devices.