Study of the Effect of Absorber Layer Thickness of CIGS Solar Cells with Different Band Gap Using SILVACO TCAD

Authors Amina Maria Laoufi 1, B. Dennai2 , O. Kadi1, M. Fillali3
Affiliations

1Smart Grid & Renewable Energy (SGRE Lab), Tahri Mohamed University of Bechar, Bechar, Algeria

2Laboratory for the Development of Renewable Energies and their Applications in Saharan areas (LDREAS), Tahri Mohamed University of Bechar, Bechar, Algeria

3Physics & Semiconductor Devices Laboratory (LPDS) Tahri Mohamed University of Bechar, Bechar, Algeria

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Issue Volume 13, Year 2021, Number 4
Dates Received 19 March 2021; revised manuscript received 04 August 2021; published online 20 August 2021
Citation Amina Maria Laoufi , B. Dennai, O. Kadi, M. Fillali, J. Nano- Electron. Phys. 13 No 4, 04018 (2021)
DOI https://doi.org/10.21272/jnep.13(4).04018
PACS Number(s) 88.40.jp, 88.40.jm
Keywords Solar cell (51) , CIGS (11) , Band gap (29) , SILVACO (7) , Thickness (13) , Performance (4) .
Annotation

In this paper, we have simulated a copper indium gallium selenide (CIGS) thin-film solar cell using a physically based two-dimensional device simulator SILVACO Atlas. The simulation of electrical characteristics and quantum efficiency was under AM1.5 illumination and a temperature of 300 K. In this work, we changed the band gap of CuInxGa1 – xSe to optimize the efficiency of the solar cell. We obtained it by varying the absorber layer thickness with different mole fractions x that affects the efficiency of the solar cell. The simulation result shows that the maximum efficiency of 16.62 % was achieved with a band gap of 1.67 eV and a thickness of 3 µm, a short-circuit current density of 29.293 mA/cm2, an open-circuit voltage of 1.29 V, and a fill factor of 87.79 %. The obtained results show that the proposed design can be considered as a potential candidate for high performance photovoltaic applications.

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