South Korean scientists used different concentrations of thiourea to manufacture this battery through a chemical bath deposition method. For the buffer layer, they use zinc instead of cadmium sulfide. The battery is flexible, with seven different colors to choose from.
CIGS thin-film solar cells developed by ETRI researchers.
Picture: Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI)
Researchers from the Korea Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) have developed a colored copper indium gallium selenide (CIGS) solar cell with a conversion efficiency of 18%.
The new battery is said to be more environmentally friendly because its buffer layer is made of zinc instead of the commonly used toxic cadmium sulfide (CdS).
The researchers said they used different concentrations of thiourea (TU) to make the battery through the chemical bath deposition (CBD) method. CBD is a technology that produces a thin film of solid inorganic non-metallic materials on the substrate by immersing the substrate in an aqueous precursor solution. Thiourea (TU) is a compound used in thin-film solar cells to obtain high-quality films during the film deposition process.
The scientists said: "After the light soaking treatment, the performance of the solar cell is significantly improved." "It was found that the performance increase is proportional to the molar concentration of TU used in the deposition of the zinc layer."
They analyzed the results of the deposition process by X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), which is the most widely used surface analysis technique to identify elements present in materials. They found that a hollow zone was formed at the interface between the CIGS and CDB-zinc layer, which inhibited electron-hole recombination and improved battery efficiency.
The battery comes in seven different colors and can be coated on flexible substrates or glass substrates. They explained: "This means that they can be bent or folded to expand their applications as the next generation of environmentally friendly energy."
They described the cell in "Ultrafast wavelength-dependent carrier dynamics associated with metastable defects in Cu(In,Ga)Se2 solar cells with a chemically deposited Zn(O,S) buffer layer." The article was recently published on Nano Energy.
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