Investigation of Electrical Parameters of CdTe Photovoltaic Devices by Computational Analysis
Nitesh Kumar Singh, Anshul Agarwal, Tirupathiraju Kanumuri
Abstract
This article discusses the numerical analysis of heterojunction photovoltaic cells based on cadmium telluride (CdTe) using the SCAPS‐1D software. A novel glass/FTO/SnO 2 /CdS/interdiffusion/CdTe/SnS 2 /Se photovoltaic cell design is proposed for investigation. Additionally, the effect of thickness variation in the p‐type CdTe film, thickness variation in the interdiffusion layer, defect density in the CdTe film, defect density in the interdiffusion layer, and acceptor concentration in the CdTe layer is studied in order to improve the photovoltaic cell's efficiency. The study determines an optimal thickness of 1 and 0.6 μm for the CdTe and interdiffusion layers, respectively, a defect density of 1 × 10 14 cm −3 for the CdTe film and interdiffusion region, an interface defect density of 1 × 10 10 cm −3 between CdTe/interdiffusion, SnS 2 /CdTe, and CdS/interdiffusion, and an acceptor concentration value of 8.5 × 10 15 cm −3 . The optimized CdTe photovoltaic cell structure with current density ( J sc ) = 30.003 mA cm −2 , open‐circuit voltage ( V oc ) = 1.061 V, and fill factor (FF) = 88.10% achieves a 28.07% efficiency, compared to the baseline CdTe photovoltaic cell structure with a 23.01% efficiency.