Novel TCO contacts for fabrication of CIGS bifacial solar cells

Object of this thesis is the development of viable technological processes for the fabrication of efficient bifacial solar cells. To this extent, a great effort was first made in order to prepare transparent conductive electrodes based on different oxide compounds and, secondly, to deposit the absorber and form the cell junction on such transparent back contacts. The new technological procedures were coupled to extensive simulation and characterization of both individual materials and working devices, which provided the necessary feedback for technology optimization. The bifacial solar cells (BFSC) considered in this thesis are all based on the compound Cu(In1-x,Gax)Se2 (CIGS), which is a very efficient light absorber. A major task of this work consisted in replacing the standard molybdenum back contact with a suitable transparent conductive oxide (TCO), and then tuning the physical properties of both TCO and absorber in order to maximize the transport of the photo-generated carriers across their interface. For all studied devices, both the absorber and the back TCO were grown via low-temperature pulsed electron deposition (LTPED). LTPED is a non-equilibrium deposition technique that relies on the ablation of a ceramic target by short and high-energy electron pulses. At IMEM-CNR in Parma, CIGS is deposited via LTPED at T=250°C. As it will be shown in the thesis, thanks to this low T (compared to alternative growth methods), high-quality CIGS may be obtained without post-deposition selenization on alternative and novel substrates, including TCOs. Conventional and new TCOs deposited by LTPED on glass were investigated in order to correlate their optical, electrical, morphological, compositional and structural properties with deposition parameters. All materials exhibited excellent optical transmittance when deposited at a substrate temperature of 100°C, but differed considerably from the point of view of electrical parameters. Only n-type TCOs provided the needed electrical conductivity, therefore a detailed study of the p-type CIGS/n-type TCO interface was carried out to identify in which conditions this junction exhibits an ohmic-like behavior (thanks to pronounced tunneling). CIGS-based BFSCs were then fabricated using the best TCOs as back contacts. Among all important results, a most remarkable achievement of this study was that aluminum zinc oxide (AZO) can be used as efficient back electrode. Actually, the existing literature states that at the deposition temperature of standard methods (550°C) a thin insulating Ga2O3 layer forms between CIGS and AZO, which impedes an efficient current flow. In this work, it is demonstrated that LTPED allows the deposition of CIGS on AZO without formation of the detrimental Ga2O3 interlayer, thus opening new routes towards building integrated photovoltaic applications, considering that AZO is a low-cost and non-toxic material. The positive results presented above were achieved in small-area cells, so that they need to be implemented also in large-area devices. A novel approach to large-area BFSCs was hence investigated in the course of the PhD work, namely the deposition of selected TCO on a glass substrate with a pre-deposited metallic grid. This was seen to ensure a more efficient collection of the photo-generated carriers and to reduce power loss at the back contact. As a matter of fact, a prototype with this architecture and four-times larger area exhibited the same efficiency of a small cell with no metallic grid. This is very encouraging in view of the practical application of TCOs to bifacial technology.