Effects of Mechanical Damage and Temperature on the Electrical Performance of CIGS Thin-Film Solar Cells

In this paper, we investigate the effect of mechanical damage and temperature on copper indium gallium diselenide (CIGS) thin-film solar cells through experiments and modeling. After generating mechanical damage on CIGS solar cell with 20% increments, the electrical performance was measured (current-voltage curve) while temperature was varying from 10 to 70 °C at 20° increments. Other measured values are open-circuit voltage (V
_oc
), fill factor (ff), maximum power (P
_max
). Those electrical values (V
_oc
, ff, P
_max
) are found as a function of temperature and percent damage. Moreover, the parameters of the single diode solar cell model were obtained as a function of temperature and percentage damage: light generation current (I
_L
), saturation current (I
₀
), shunt resistance (R
_sh
), and series resistance (R
_s
). Our paper contributes to the deeper understanding of the concurrent effect of temperature and mechanical damage to solar cells.