Numerical simulation of grain boundary effects in Cu(In,Ga)Se2 thin-film solar cells

Two-dimensional numerical simulations of polycrystalline Cu(In,Ga)Se2 thin-film solar cells show that grain boundary (GB) recombination can deteriorate the photovoltaic power conversion efficiency of these devices by about 9% absolute with respect to a starting value of 21.7% that would hold for a material without GBs. The achieved record efficiencies of 19% are only possible if the recombination velocity S at GBs is kept below S=103 cm s−1. Comparing devices that have all defects homogeneously distributed in the bulk to devices where the same number of defects is concentrated at GBs only unveils that the latter situation is more favorable because of kinetic restrictions. The efficiency difference between the homogeneous and the concentrated cases is, however, only 1% (absolute). We further model the possible effect of an additional hole barrier at the GB by assuming asymmetric capture cross-sections for electrons and holes. We find that the positive consequence of this feature is rather limited and much dependent on the specific properties of the GB defects. For example, the efficiency improves by 2% when introducing a hole barrier of 120 meV at a GB with midgap defects. The same improvement would result from a reduction of the GB defects by a factor of 2.5.