Development of Earth-Abundant and Non-Toxic Thin-Film Solar Cells

Abstract

Although solar energy is the most abundant energy resource available, photovoltaic solar cells must consist of sufficiently abundant and environmentally friendly elements, for scalable low-cost production to provide a major amount of the world’s energy supply. However, scalability is limited in current thin-film solar cell technologies based on Cu(In,Ga)(S,Se)2 and CdTe due to scarce, expensive, and toxic elements. Thin-film solar cells consisting of earth-abundant and non-toxic materials were made from pulsed chemical vapor deposition (pulsed-CVD) of SnS as the p-type absorber layer and atomic layer deposition (ALD) of Zn(O,S) as the n-type buffer layer. Solar cells with a structure of Mo/SnS/Zn(O,S)/ZnO/ITO were studied by varying the synthesis conditions of the SnS and Zn(O,S) layers. Annealing SnS in hydrogen sulfide increased the mobility by more than one order of magnitude, and improved the power conversion efficiency of the solar cell devices.

Solar cell performance can be further optimized by adjusting the stoichiometry of Zn(O,S), and by tuning the electrical properties of Zn(O,S) through various in situ or post-annealing treatments. Zn(O,S) can be post-annealed in oxygen atmosphere or doped with nitrogen, by ammonium hydroxide or ammonia gas, during the ALD growth to reduce the carrier concentration, which can be critical for reducing interface recombination at the p-n junction. High carrier concentration buffer layers can be critical for reducing contact resistance with the ITO layer. Zn(O,S) can also be incorporated with aluminum by trimethylaluminum (TMA) doses to either increase or decrease the carrier concentration based on the stoichiometry of Zn(O,S).