Cadmium-free CIGS solar cell with 18% effectiveness

• South Korean researchers made the cell with the chemical bath deposition method, utilizing various thiourea focus. For the buffer layer, they used zinc as opposed to cadmium sulfide. The cell is flexible and also is readily available in 7 various shades.

Scientists from South Korea's Electronics as well as Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) have created a colored copper indium gallium selenide (CIGS) solar cell with an 18% conversion performance.

The brand-new cell is purportedly more environmentally friendly, as its buffer layer is made of zinc as opposed to hazardous cadmium sulfide (CdS), which is frequently utilized.

They produced the cell with the chemical bath deposition technique (CBD), making use of various thiourea (TU) concentrations, the scientists stated. CBD is a method to create movies of strong not natural, non-metallic products on substratums by submersing the substrate in a forerunner liquid option. Thiourea (TU) is a substance utilized in thin-film solar cells to accomplish top quality movies in the film-deposition process.

" The solar cells showed a substantial increment in the performance after light saturating therapy," the scientists said. "The efficiency increment was located to be symmetrical to the TU mole focus used in zinc layer deposition."

They assessed the results of the deposition process with X-ray photoemission spectroscopy (XPS)-- one of the most extensively made use of surface analysis technique to identify the elements that exist in a material. They discovered that a hollow band area was formed at the interface in between the CIGS as well as CDB-zinc layers, which caused the suppression of electron-hole recombination and also improved the cell effectiveness.

The cell is offered in 7 various colors as well as can be coated on a flexible substratum or a glass substrate. "This implies that they could be bent or folded up, expanding applications as a next-generation eco-friendly energy source," they explained.

They explain the cell in "Ultrafast wavelength-dependent carrier dynamics connected to metastable problems in Cu(In, Ga)Se2 solar cells with chemically transferred Zn(O, S) barrier layer," which was just recently released in Nano Energy.