Improving the performance of cadmium telluride-based solar cells using ZnCdS / NiO and ZnO compounds for ETL / HTL and TCO layers

Cadmium telluride (CdTe) solar cell is known for its high efficiency, low cost and high stability. In this paper, simulation of CdTe based solar cell (ZnO/ZnCdS/CdTe/NiO/Al) has been presented. ZnCdS, NiO and ZnO layers have been used as electron/hole transport layer (ETL/HTL) and transparent conductive oxide (TCO) layer, respectively. SCAPS-1D simulation software was used to evaluate the performance of the modelled multijunction CdTe solar cell. This software is capable of analyzing the efficiency with different parameters of cadmium telluride solar cell. The impact of thickness, carrier concentration, defect density of the CdTe, and ZnCdS/ CdTe interface defect density on the solar cell performance was also investigated. The optimized solar cell demonstrated a maximum power conversion efficiency (PCE) of 26.3 % with open circuit voltage (VOC) of 1.095 V, short circuit current density (JSC) of 27.22 mA/cm2 and FF of 88.14 % that shows huge promise in low-cost solar energy harvesting.