With the advent of the 21st century, one of the serious problems facing mankind is harmful effects of global warming. Add to that the ever increasing cost of fuel and the importance of development of clean energy resources as alternative to fossil fuel has becomes one of the prime and pressing challenges for modern science and technology in the 21st century. Recent studies have shown that energy related sources account for 50% of the total emission of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. All research activities are focused on developing various technologies that are capable of converting sunlight into electricity with high efficiency and can be produced using a cost-effective process. One of such technologies is the CuIn1-xGaxSe2 (CIGS) and its alloys that can be produced using cost-effective techniques and also exhibit high photo-conversion efficiency. The work presented here discusses some of the fundamental issues related to high volume production of CIGS thin film solar cells. Three principal issues that have been addressed in this work are effect of reduction in absorber thickness on device performance, micrononuniformity involved with amount of sodium and its effect on device performance and lastly the effect of working distance on the properties of molybdenum back contact. An effort has been made to understand the effect of absorber thickness on PV parameters and optimize the process parameters accordingly. Very thin (
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ucf.edu/oai:stars.library.ucf.edu:etd-2658 |
| Date | 01 January 2010 |
| Creators | Pethe, Shirish A. |
| Publisher | STARS |
| Source Sets | University of Central Florida |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | Electronic Theses and Dissertations |
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