Metalorganic chemical vapor deposition of cadmium telluride for solar cell applications
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Authors
Su, Peng-Yu
Issue Date
2015-12
Type
Electronic thesis
Thesis
Thesis
Language
ENG
Keywords
Electrical engineering
Alternative Title
Abstract
In the first part of the work, fundamental studies on heterojunction solar cells using single crystal CdTe were carried out to understand the limit of CdTe solar cells. Current thin-film CdTe solar cells are polycrystalline with low doping concentrations (10^13 cm^-3 - 10^14 cm^-3) and short lifetime (<10 ns). Hence, there is a room to improve on the performance of thin-film CdTe solar cells. To fabricate solar cells, single crystal CdTe films were grown on GaAs substrates by using MOCVD. Heavily doped p-type CdTe films with hole concentrations up to ~5×10^16 cm^-3 were obtained. Amorphous n-CdS/single crystal p-CdTe solar cells have been fabricated and characterized. Nevertheless, the solar cell performances such as Voc (0.63 V) is still limited by the CdTe crystal quality since high density of dislocations is still present due to the large lattice mismatch between GaAs and CdTe and also between CdTe and CdS.
Description
December 2015
School of Engineering
School of Engineering
Full Citation
Publisher
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY