Improving the efficiency of ZnTe based heterojunction solar cell with In2Te3 BSF layer.

Zinc telluride (ZnTe) is considered as a favorable photovoltaic (PV) material for its desirable absorption coefficient, improved conversion efficiency, and consequently inexpensive production material requirements. The principal objective of this research is to improve the performance of newly designed Al/ZnO/CdS/ZnTe/In2Te3/Pt solar cell and to investigate the influence of the Indium telluride (In2Te3) back surface field (BSF) layer on the performance parameters of open-circuit voltage (Voc), short-circuit current density (Jsc), fill factor (FF), and power conversion efficiency (PCE). This simulation analyses the performance of the baseline structure Al/ZnO/CdS/ZnTe/Pt which is considered as without BSF and the proposed structure Al/ZnO/CdS/ZnTe/In2Te3/Pt with BSF. The thicknesses and doping density have been used are 30, 30, 500, and 100 nm and 1019, 1018, 1019, and 1021 cm−3 for ZnO, CdS, ZnTe, and In2Te3 layer, respectively, with bulk defect density of 1014 cm−3 for each layer of the proposed cell. The PCE has been achieved 18.40 and 20.20% with VOC of 1.860 and 2.008 V, JSC of 10.79 and 10.99 mA cm−2, as well as FF of 91.87 and 91.92% for the baseline and proposed solar cell, correspondingly. The present study provides the guidelines for the realization of high efficiency and thin ZnTe-based solar cell in cost-effective way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]