Publication:
Evaporated solid-phase crystallised poly-silicon thin film solar cells on glass

dc.contributor.advisor Sproul, Alistair en_US
dc.contributor.advisor Varlamov, Sergey en_US
dc.contributor.author Kunz, Oliver en_US
dc.date.accessioned 2022-03-22T17:07:51Z
dc.date.available 2022-03-22T17:07:51Z
dc.date.issued 2009 en_US
dc.description.abstract The cost of photovoltaic electricity needs to be significantly reduced in order to achieve a high electricity market penetration. Thin-film solar cells have good potential to achieve such cost savings though (i) large-area deposition onto low-cost foreign substrates, (ii) more streamlined processing, (iii) monolithic cell interconnection, and very efficient use of the expensive semiconductor material. Polycrystalline silicon (poly-Si) on glass is a promising technology for the cost-effective large volume production of PV modules since it (i) makes use of an abundant raw material, (ii) is non-toxic, (iii) does not suffer from light-induced degradation, and (iv) does not rely on TCO layers. Usually plasma enhanced chemical vapour deposition (PECVD) is used for the layer formation. This thesis explores the use of e-beam evaporation as deposition method since it is potentially much faster and cheaper than PECVD. The resulting solar cells are referred to as EVA (from EVAporation). Two inherent shunting mechanisms in EVA cells are demonstrated to be shunting through sub-micron sized pinholes when the back electrode is deposited and shunting between the emitter and the absorber layer at the glass-side electrode. Through the improved understanding of these shunting mechanisms it was possible to develop a suitable metallisation scheme for EVA cells using an aligned deposition of emitter and back surface field line contacts and a specially developed shunt mitigation etching technique. For the first time appreciable efficiencies of up to 5.2% were demonstrated on this material. It was also shown that only very lightly doped absorber layers can lead to the required high short-circuit currents in EVA cells. The resulting cells are currently completely limited by space charge region recombination occurring with comparatively low ideality factors of only ~ 1.4 This thesis also demonstrates the usefulness of Jsc-Suns measurements and investigates optical loss mechanisms in the current devices. Advanced modelling of distributed series resistance effects, influencing Suns-Voc, m-Voc and Jsc-Suns curves, is employed. PC1D modelling is used to extract relevant device parameters. In this work it was found that the diffusion length in the best EVA cells is longer than the absorber layer and that insufficient light trapping is currently the major hurdle to higher cell efficiencies. From the obtained results it can be concluded that EVA solar cells are promising candidates for the low-cost and high-volume production of solar modules. en_US
dc.identifier.uri http://hdl.handle.net/1959.4/43644
dc.language English
dc.language.iso EN en_US
dc.publisher UNSW, Sydney en_US
dc.rights CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 en_US
dc.rights.uri https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/au/ en_US
dc.subject.other Polycrystalline silicon en_US
dc.subject.other Polycrystalline silicon en_US
dc.subject.other Silicon thin-film solar cells en_US
dc.subject.other Evaporated silicon en_US
dc.title Evaporated solid-phase crystallised poly-silicon thin film solar cells on glass en_US
dc.type Thesis en_US
dcterms.accessRights open access
dcterms.rightsHolder Kunz, Oliver
dspace.entity.type Publication en_US
unsw.accessRights.uri https://purl.org/coar/access_right/c_abf2
unsw.identifier.doi https://doi.org/10.26190/unsworks/20340
unsw.relation.faculty Engineering
unsw.relation.originalPublicationAffiliation Kunz, Oliver, Photovoltaics & Renewable Energy Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, UNSW en_US
unsw.relation.originalPublicationAffiliation Sproul, Alistair, Photovoltaics & Renewable Energy Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, UNSW en_US
unsw.relation.originalPublicationAffiliation Varlamov, Sergey, Photovoltaics & Renewable Energy Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, UNSW en_US
unsw.relation.school School of Photovoltaic and Renewable Energy Engineering *
unsw.thesis.degreetype PhD Doctorate en_US
Files
Original bundle
Now showing 1 - 1 of 1
No Thumbnail Available
Name:
whole.pdf
Size:
2.73 MB
Format:
application/pdf
Description:
Resource type