Kudiy D. Physical-technological basis of obtaining CdS layers for thin film solar cells

Object: cadmium sulfide films and film solar cells, in which they are used. The purpose: development of physical bases of materials science optimization technologies for producing of cadmium sulfide layers for different types of effective film solar cells. Methods: chemical and electrochemical deposition, vacuum thermal evaporation, X-ray diffraction methods, scanning electron microscopy, optical spectrometry, measurements and analytical processing of light-current-voltage characteristics. Results: for the first time is found that when using the cadmium sulfide films obtained by vacuum thermal evaporation, in back solar cells, based on cadmium telluride is necessary not only to ensure their preferential orientation in the [001] and to minimize the compressive macrostresses, but to reduce the intensity of interfacial interaction at the CdS/CdTe with further formation of the device structure by pre-annealing in vacuum before applying CdTe base layer. It is experimentally shown that the previous annealing of cadmium sulfide films obtained by vacuum thermal evaporation allows to obtain the laboratory specimens of film solar cells based on CdTe with an efficiency of 9.5% at a thickness of CdS 0,4 microns. Field of application: solid state physics, semiconductor physics, solar energetics