A novel manufacturing process for fabricating CdS/CdTe polycrystalline thin-film solar cells

摘要

There are several production disadvantages inherent in conventional SnO{sub}2/CdS/CdTe manufacturing processes. In this paper, we report a novel manufacturing process for fabricating polycrystalline Cd{sub}2SnO{sub}4/Zn{sub}2SnO{sub}4/CdS/CdTe thin-film solar cells that yielded a CdS/CdTe device with an NREL-confirmed efficiency of 14.0%. This process addresses undesirable manufacturing issues such as time-consuming and expensive heat-up and cool-down processes and generation of large amounts of liquid waste. CdTe cells prepared by this process have good performance, good uniformity, acceptable device stability, and excellent reproducibility.