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Understanding the Role of Selenium in Defect Passivation for Highly Efficient Selenium-Alloyed Cadmium Telluride Solar Cells.pdf (1.42 MB)

Understanding the role of selenium in defect passivation for highly efficient selenium-alloyed cadmium telluride solar cells

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journal contribution
posted on 2019-05-21, 10:20 authored by Tom Fiducia, Budhika G. Mendis, Kexue Li, Chris R.M. Grovenor, Amit Munshi, Kurt L. Barth, Walajabad S. Sampath, Lewis Wright, Ali Abbas, Jake BowersJake Bowers, Michael WallsMichael Walls
Electricity produced by cadmium telluride (CdTe) photovoltaic modules is the lowest cost in the solar industry, and now undercuts fossil fuel-based sources in many regions of the world. This is due to recent efficiency gains brought about by alloying selenium into the CdTe absorber, which has taken cell efficiency from 19.5% to its current record of 22.1%. While the addition of selenium is known to reduce the bandgap of the absorber material and hence increase cell short-circuit current, this effect alone does not explain the performance improvement. Here, by means of cathodoluminescence (CL) and secondary ion mass spectrometry (SIMS), we show that selenium enables higher luminescence efficiency and longer diffusion lengths in the alloyed material, indicating that selenium passivates critical defects in the bulk of the absorber layer. This passivation effect explains the record-breaking performance of selenium-alloyed CdTe devices, and provides a route for further efficiency improvement that can result in even lower costs for solar generated electricity.

History

School

  • Mechanical, Electrical and Manufacturing Engineering

Published in

Nature Energy

Volume

4

Pages

504–511

Citation

FIDUCIA, T. .... et al., 2019. Understanding the role of selenium in defect passivation for highly efficient selenium-alloyed cadmium telluride solar cells. Nature Energy, 4, pp.504–511.

Publisher

© the authors. Published by Springer

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This paper was accepted for publication in the journal Nature Energy and the definitive published version is available at https://doi.org/10.1038/s41560-019-0389-z.

Acceptance date

2019-05-07

Publication date

2019-05-13

eISSN

2058-7546

Language

  • en

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    Loughborough Publications

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