Abstract
The performance of a solar cell mainly is due to the quality of the starting material. During the production of the solar cell, several defects in different regions of the material appear. These defects degrade the efficiency of the solar cell. Thorough knowledge of the physical properties of defects requires highly sophisticated electrical current-voltage (I-V) characterization techniques that provide information on the physical origin of the defects. The characteristic (I-V) of the cell is governed by several parameters, such as the saturation current Is and the ideality factor n which are the indicators of the quality of the solar cell. These parameters significantly reflect the existence of defects in the material. On the other hand, the use of such a characteristic to go back to the nature of the defects is not widespread because it lacks a data base between the main defects and the modification of the characteristic (I-V). To extract the different parameters, we developed a method based on artificial neurons in Matlab code, then we applied this method to the following cells: GaAs, Simono and polycrystalline and CIGS thin-film cells by applying the model with two diodes. The results obtained demonstrate that the behavior of the ideality factor and the saturation current vary from one cell to another. This variance is important for polycrystalline Si and CIGS cells. Thus, this model is the most suitable for the diagnosis of the characteristics (I-V) for Si and GaAs, but remains incoherent (Mismatches) to describe the characteristic of the CIGS cell because of the non-uniform presence of shunt defects which allowed us to add another component of the leakage current. Finally, this method correlates with the experimental characteristic (I-V).