Design and simulation of a high efficiency CdS/CdTe solar cell

A thin film solar cell based on cadmium telluride (CdTe) has been investigated by means of an accurate numerical simulation study. To optimize the design in terms of power conversion efficiency, we have studied the influence of doping concentration and carrier lifetime in the CdTe layer as well as the impact of different geometrical parameters in defining the device structure. In more detail, the solar cell consists of a fluorine doped tin oxide layer stacked, from top to bottom, on a highly resistive transparent film, a n-type layer of cadmium sulphide (CdS), and a p-type CdTe absorber layer. A good agreement between the simulation results and recent experimental data taken from literature has been achieved. The optimized design performs a short-circuit current density of 29.09 mA/cm2, an open-circuit voltage of 0.95 V, a fill-factor of 83.47 %, and a conversion efficiency on the order of 23 % under air mass 1.5 global spectrum (AM1.5G) with an incident irradiance of 1000 W/m2.