Power change in amorphous silicon technology by low temperature annealing

¹ Photovoltaics System, Austrian Institute of Technology, 1220 Vienna, Austria
² Department of Physics, University of Vienna, 1010 Vienna, Austria

^a e-mail: ankit.mittal.fl@ait.ac.at

Received: 1 October 2014
Accepted: 16 June 2015
Published online: 10 July 2015

Abstract

Amorphous silicon (a-Si) is one of the best established thin-film solar-cell technologies. Despite its long history of research, it still has many critical issues because of its defect rich material and its susceptibility to degrade under light also called as Staebler-Wronski effect (SWE). This leads to an increase in the defect density of a-Si, but as a metastable effect it can be completely healed at temperatures above 170 °C. Our study is focused on investigating the behavior of annealing of different a-Si modules under low temperature conditions below 80 °C indicated by successive change of module power. These conditions reflect the environmental temperature impact of the modules in the field, or integrated in buildings as well. The power changes were followed by STC power rating and investigation of module-power evolution under low irradiance conditions at 50 W/m². Our samples were recovered close to their initial state of power, reaching as high as 99% from its degraded value. This shows the influence of low temperature annealing and light on metastable module behavior in a-Si thin-film modules.