Qichen Zhao,Honglie Shen,Yajun Xu,Kai Gao,Dewen Chen,Yufang Li
Flexible CZTS solar cells have attracted significant attention in recent years owing to their high earth element composition and high photovoltaic conversion efficiency. However, these cells are associated with limitations common in compound thin-film solar cells, such as heterojunction interface combination centers, material defects, and energy level mismatch. In the current study, a green and simple solution spin-coating method is proposed for the preparation of flexible solar cells with multicycle CZTS/CCZTS absorber stacked structures to effectively circumvent the limitations of flexible devices. The results showed that the optimized Zn/Cd ratio results in CCZTS films with large grain longitudinal growth. However, lots of small broken grains were formed at the bottom of the absorber owing to the large lattice spacing, leading to the formation of cell leakage channels. The surface morphology of the absorber film was improved by preparing a stacked structure of CZTS and CCZTS with different periods while suppressing the longitudinal grain delamination. The stacked structure also helps to match the energy band of CZTS/CCZTS/CdS heterojunction. The top layer of CCZTS forms a buffered “energy band ladder” in the energy band of the CZTS/CdS heterojunction, thus suppressing the rapid carrier recombination caused by the Cliff-type energy band bending. A flexible solar cell was thus prepared to obtain a high photoelectric conversion efficiency of 6.51%, and the cells showed excellent resistance to mechanical bending.
Because of their excellent optical and electrical properties, Cu2ZnSnS4 (CZTS) thin films have been considered as a potential absorber layer for solar cells. However, CZTS suffers from some problems, such as secondary phases, antisite defects, and band tailing issues. Introducing Cd into CZTS to form Cu2CdxZn1−xSnS4 (CCZTS) is an effective method for alleviating the limitations of CZTS. In this study, the nanoparticle ink method was used to fabricate CCZTS thin films, and the effect of Cd content on the properties of CCZTS thin films was studied. The results showed that the as-prepared thin films had high purity, good crystallinity and photocurrent response. The photosensitivity and power conversion efficiency increased at first and then decreased with increasing Cd content. Due to the relatively excellent crystallization and photoresponse characteristics, the highest conversion efficiency of 0.72% was obtained when x = 0.3.