Manufacturing, simulation and study of the efficiency of CdTe/CdS solar cell

The present article reports on a simple, Vacuum evaporation technique for the deposit of CdTe thin films with different thicknesses of (100, 200, 300, 400, 500) nm on P-type silicon substrates. After that, a thin layers of CdS and SnO2 were deposited as a buffer and window layer with thickness 100 nm respectively, by utilizing same technique. In addition, another samples of these films were also deposited on glass substrate for the purpose of studying optical transmission and their optical properties. High-Resolution X rays diffraction (HR-XRD) was used for the characterization of the films crystalline structures. The cross-section of the deposited samples was photographed using SEM technology for the purpose of measuring the thickness of the layers and detecting defects, if any. The aim of the present work is to investigate the effects of different thickness of CdTe thin films on the optical and electrical of CdTe/CdS/SnO2 films and potential applications in solar cells. Results show that the use of different thickness of deposited thin films of CdTe can enhance the performance., the optimized thickness of 400nm, 500 nm presents an increasing efficiency from 2.2073% to 2.2833% , and with Voc from 0.325 V to 0.347 V. After that, the manufactured models were simulated using the SCAPS 1D program to find out the extent of agreement and difference between the experimental and theoretical models, and the highest value of efficiency was 2.88% for CdTe with a thickness of 500 nm.