Date Available

3-18-2016

Year of Publication

2016

Degree Name

Master of Science in Electrical Engineering (MSEE)

Document Type

Master's Thesis

College

Engineering

Department/School/Program

Electrical and Computer Engineering

First Advisor

Dr. Vijay P. Singh

Abstract

Numerical simulations of current-voltage characteristics of nanowire CdS/CdTe solar cells are performed as a function of temperature using SCAPS-1D. This research compares the experimental current-voltage (I-V) characteristics with the numerical (I-V) simulations obtained from SCAPS-1D at various temperatures. Various device parameters were studied which can affect the efficiency of the nanowire-CdS/CdTe solar cell. It was observed that the present simulated model explains the important effects of these solar cell devices, such as the crossover and the rollover effect. It was shown that the removal of defect in i-SnO2 is responsible for producing the crossover effect. In the past, the rollover effect has been explained by using back to back diode model in the literature. In this work, simulations were performed in order to validate this theory. At the back electrode, the majority carrier barrier height was varied from 0.4 to 0.5 eV, the curve corresponding to the 0.5 eV barrier showed a strong rollover effect, while this effect disappeared when the barrier was reduced to 0.4 eV. Thus, it was shown that the change of barrier height at the contact is a critical parameter in the rollover effect.

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

http://dx.doi.org/10.13023/ETD.2016.036

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