Low cost Photovoltaics -- R&D for the Solar Energy Industry

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Next Generation Thin Film Solar Devices

Thin film solar cells made from Copper Indium Gallium Diselenide (CIGS) absorbers show great promise in achieving high conversion efficiencies approaching 20%. The record high efficiency of CIGS solar cells (19.2% NREL) is by far the highest compared with those achieved by other thin film technologies such as Cadmium Telluride (CdTe) or amorphous Silicon (a-Si).

These record breaking small area devices have been fabricated using vacuum evaporation techniques which are capital intensive and quite costly. It is very challenging for laboratories using vacuum processing to fabricate CIGS films of uniform composition on large area substrates. This limitation also affects the process yield, which are generally quite low with other industry groups. Because of these limitations, implementation of evaporation techniques has not been successful for large-scale, low-cost commercial production of thin film solar cells and modules and is non-competitive with the work-horse of today's crystalline silicon solar modules.

To overcome the limitations of the physical vapor deposition techniques that use expensive vacuum equipment, we at ISET have been developing non-vacuum processes for the fabrication of CIGS solar cells.

Low Cost CIGS Manufacturing

Over the past six years, with support from NREL/DOE and ATP/NIST, ISET has successfully developed and patented a novel, low cost, non-vacuum approach to the deposition of the CIGS absorber layer.  This patented process uses water-based inks made from tiny nanoparticles of copper, indium and gallium oxides as precursor materials. The proprietary ink formulation allows us to fix the composition of precursor oxides molecularly and thus by gas-solid processing, we accurately and uniformly control the composition of the semiconductor over large areas.

Using ink technology, we benefit from very high active materials utilization with relatively low capital equipment costs.  The combined effect is a low-cost manufacturing process for thin film solar devices that is directly translatable to a number of rigid and flexible lightweight substrates.  Commercialization of this technology will serve broad markets and deliver solar generated power for both terrestrial and space applications.

For more information on ISET's Non-Vacuum Process, click here

  View a demo of our ink coating scheme 

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