Toward Higher Efficiency Of Low-Cost Flexible Single-Crystal-Like Gaas Thin Film Solar Cells On Metal Tapes

III-V compound semiconductors are the best photovoltaic solar cell (SC) materials for highest conversion efficiencies. However, they are expensive and lack in mechanical flexibility and manufacturing scalability. We developed a new PV platform where nearly single crystalline III V thin films were directly deposited on inexpensive polycrystalline metal tapes. While a promising efficiency of similar to 7.5% was achieved for flexible single junction SCs on this platform, the open circuit voltage of SC suffers from minority carrier recombination at grain-boundary sites according to a simulation study. A bulk passivation treatment is conducted on the SC devices which resulted in more than 350mV increase for V-oc.