A facile chemical-mechanical polishing lift-off transfer process toward large scale Cu(In,Ga)Se2 thin-film solar cells on arbitrary substrates

The fabrication of Cu(In,Ga)Se2 (CIGS) solar cells on flexible substrates is a non-trivial task due to thermal and ion diffusion related issues. In order to circumvent these issues, we have developed a chemical-mechanical polishing lift-off (CMPL) transfer process, enabling the direct transfer of CI...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Nanoscale 2016-03, Vol.8 (9), p.5181-5188
Main Authors: Tseng, Kuan-Chun, Yen, Yu-Ting, Thomas, Stuart R, Tsai, Hung-Wei, Hsu, Cheng-Hung, Tsai, Wen-Chi, Shen, Chang-Hong, Shieh, Jia-Min, Wang, Zhiming M, Chueh, Yu-Lun
Format: Article
Language:English
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Summary:The fabrication of Cu(In,Ga)Se2 (CIGS) solar cells on flexible substrates is a non-trivial task due to thermal and ion diffusion related issues. In order to circumvent these issues, we have developed a chemical-mechanical polishing lift-off (CMPL) transfer process, enabling the direct transfer of CIGS solar cells from conventional soda-lime glass (SLG) onto arbitrary flexible substrates up to 4 cm(2) in size. The structural and compositional nature of the pre- and post-transferred films is examined using electron microscopy, X-ray diffraction analysis, Raman and photoluminescence spectroscopy. We demonstrate the fabrication of solar cells on a range of flexible substrates while being able to maintain 75% cell efficiency (η) when compared to pre-transferred solar cells. The results obtained in this work suggest that our transfer process offers a highly promising approach toward large scale fabrication of CIGS-based solar cells on a wide variety of flexible substrates, suitable for use in the large scale CIGS photovoltaic industry.
ISSN:2040-3372
DOI:10.1039/c5nr07008b