| Pacific Rim Symposium on Surfaces, Coatings and Interfaces (PacSurf 2016) | |
| Energy Harvesting & Storage | Wednesday Sessions |
| Session EH-WeP |
| Session: | Energy Harvesting & Storage Poster Session |
| Presenter: | Sebastian Siol, NREL, USA |
| Authors: | S. Siol, NREL, USA T. Dhakal, Binghamton University, USA G. Gudavalli, Binghamton University, USA P. Rajbhandari, Binghamton University, USA C. DeHart, NREL, USA L. Baranowski, NREL, USA A. Zakutayev, NREL, USA |
| Correspondent: | Click to Email |
High-throughput computational and experimental techniques have been used in the past to accelerate the discovery of new promising solar cell materials. An important part of the development of novel thin film solar cell technologies, that is still considered a bottleneck for both theory and experiment, is the search for alternative interfacial contact (buffer) layers. The research and development of contact materials is difficult due to the inherent complexity that arises from its interactions at the interface with the absorber. A promising alternative to the commonly used CdS buffer layer in thin film solar cells that contain absorbers with lower electron affinity can be found in β-In2S3. However, the synthesis conditions for the sputter deposition of this material are not well established.
Here, In2S3 is investigated as a solar cell contact material utilizing a high throughput combinatorial screening of the temperature-flux parameter space, followed by a number of spatially-resolved characterization techniques. It is demonstrated that by tuning the sulfur partial pressure, phase pure β-In2S3 could be deposited using a broad range of substrate temperatures between 500°C and ambient temperature [1]. Combinatorial photovoltaic device libraries with Al/ZnO/In2S3/Cu2ZnSnS4/Mo/SiO2 structure were built at optimal processing conditions to investigate the feasibility of the sputtered In2S3 buffer layers and for an accelerated optimization of the device structure. The performance of the resulting In2S3/Cu2ZnSnS4 photovoltaic devices is on par with CdS/Cu2ZnSnS4 reference solar cells with similar values for short circuit currents and open circuit voltages.
Overall, these results demonstrate how a high-throughput experimental approach can be used to accelerate the development of contact materials and facilitate the optimization of thin film solar cell devices.
[1] S. Siol et al. ACS Appl. Mater. Interfaces 2016, 8, 14004.