Date of Thesis

Summer 2019

Description

The prime focus of the energy-research community in recent times has been replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy. Therefore, photovoltaic research areas are rapidly expanding in this era. The purpose of this work is to compare three different structural ZnO/ZnTe solar cell types (planar, axial micropillar and radial micropillar). The best optical and electrical performance has been obtained by the radial junction (core-shell) ZnO/ZnTe micropillar solar cell due to its pillar structure and radial junction. The unique advantage of the radial junction micropillar is that the angle of the incident light and the carrier collection is orthogonal. Therefore, the pillar can be long enough to absorb 90% of the incident light. We explored the effect of dimension of the pillar (height, pitch and diameter) on the optical and electrical performance of the ZnO/ZnTe core-shell micropillar structure. An exploration of height in the range between 1.5 μm to 4 μm was studied. The results demonstrated that increasing the pillar height increases both optical and electrical performance of the device. Pitch value between 0.2 μm ~ 0.6 μm was explored. Both the minimum pitch value (0.2 μm) and maximum pitch value (0.6 μm) presented the worst performance for the device. In addition, the shell thickness (ZnTe) between 70 nm ~ 130 nm was studied. A shell thickness of 70 nm showed promising results in terms of optical and electrical performance. The effect of doping concentration on the electrical performance and auger recombination rate of the core-shell ZnO/ZnTe solar cell has been studied in this work.

Keywords

finite-difference-time-domain (FDTD), core-shell ZnO/ZnTe micropillar solar cells, simulation, efficiency, doping concentration, pillar dimension

Access Type

Masters Thesis

Degree Type

Master of Science in Electrical Engineering

Major

Electrical Engineering

First Advisor

Amal Kabalan

Second Advisor

Alan Cheville

Third Advisor

Peter Mark Jansson

Download

Share

COinS