Purpose
The purpose of this study is to design and optimize copper indium gallium selenide (CIGS) thin film solar cells.
Design/methodology/approach
A novel bi-layer CIGS thin film solar cell based on SnS is designed. To improve the performance of the CIGS based thin film solar cell a tin sulfide (SnS) layer is added to the structure, as back surface field and second absorbing layer. Defect recombination centers have a significant effect on the performance of CIGS solar cells by changing recombination rate and charge density. Therefore, performance of the proposed structure is investigated in two stages successively, considering typical and maximum reported trap density for both CIGS and SnS. To achieve valid results, the authors use previously reported experimental parameters in the simulations.
Findings
First by considering the typical reported trap density for both SnS and CIGS, high efficiency of 36%, was obtained. Afterward maximum reported trap densities of 1 × 1019 and 5.6 × 1015 cm−3 were considered for SnS and CIGS, respectively. The efficiency of the optimized cell is 27.17% which is achieved in CIGS and SnS thicknesses of cell are 0.3 and 0.1 µm, respectively. Therefore, even in this case, the obtained efficiency is well greater than previous structures while the absorbing layer thickness is low.
Originality/value
Having results similar to practical CIGS solar cells, the impact of the defects of SnS and CIGS layers was investigated. It was found that affixing SnS between CIGS and Mo layers causes a significant improvement in the efficiency of CIGS thin-film solar cell.
