Graduation Year
2011
Document Type
Thesis
Degree
M.S.E.E.
Degree Granting Department
Electrical Engineering
Major Professor
Christos S. Ferekides, Ph.D.
Committee Member
Don Morel, Ph.D.
Committee Member
Andrew Hoff, Ph.D.
Keywords
Diffusion Barrier, MoN, Reactive Sputtering, δ-MoN, Amorphous Barrier
Abstract
CdTe solar cells in the superstrate configuration have achieved record efficiencies of 16% but those in the substrate configuration have reached efficiencies of only 7.8%. A major reason for the lower efficiency of substrate CdTe solar cells is the poor back contact. In this work, CdTe solar cells of the substrate configuration have been fabricated on flexible metallic substrates. For this type of devices, impurity diffusion out of stainless-steel substrates due to high temperature processing can be a cause for poor cell performance. It is necessary to investigate ways of improving the back contact by trying to mitigate the above factors. In this work, Nitrogen has been incorporated in Molybdenum by RF magnetron sputtering. Nitrogen incorporation has helped achieve a 2% increase in efficiency for the best cell and an improvement of 1.5% on an average.
Scholar Commons Citation
Guntur, Vasudha, "Molybdenum Nitride Films in the Back Contact Structure of Flexible Substrate CdTe Solar Cells" (2011). USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations.
https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/etd/3136
