Materials Optimization for thin-film copper indium gallium selenide (CIGS) solar cell based on distributed braggs reflector

Reflection losses in solar cells lead towards thermalization losses which greatly affect the performance of the cell. This paper aims to report and explore a novel architecture to reduce the reflection losses by utilizing distributed braggs reflector (DBR) technique which is used to enhance the absorption of light in the active region. Theoretically, thickness optimization for different materials including Window, Buffer and Back Surface Field (BSF) was performed with different operating temperature with the objective to extract high performance parameters. After optimizing the materials for the effective layer, DBR pairs was introduced which delivers the highest efficiency (N) of 23.29 % with the correlated parameters such as, Shot circuit current density, Jsc = 27.83 mA/cm2, Open circuit voltage, Voc = 1.02 V and Fill factor, FF = 87.76 %. The results signify that the structure with BSF and DBR pairs shows enhanced performance parameters as compared to those structure without these layers. In addition, it has been observed that the increased number of DBR pairs result in the enhancement of N by 0.91 % under 1.5 AM. The results strongly convinced that the introduction of DBR pairs significantly improves the performance parameters. Moreover, the optimized structure was tested with various operating temperature to examine its thermal stability towards high temperature. The proposed design with rigorously optimized layers can be a good choice for solar cell technology (STC) and can be employed as a substitute to less efficient solar cells.

Automated summary

This paper presents a novel architecture to reduce reflection losses in solar cells using the DBR technique, resulting in improved performance parameters. The structure with BSF and DBR pairs shows enhanced performance parameters compared to structures without these layers.