Aluminium-doped zinc oxide deposited by ultrasonic spray pyrolysis for thin film solar cell applications

Arnou, Nayia; Bowers, Jake; Walls, Michael

Aluminium-doped zinc oxide deposited by ultrasonic spray pyrolysis for thin film solar cell applications

conference contribution

posted on 2014-08-22, 14:22 authored by Nayia Arnou, Jake BowersJake Bowers, Michael WallsMichael Walls

Aluminium-doped zinc oxide (AZO) thin films were deposited on glass substrates by ultrasonic spray pyrolysis from metal salt precursors. The electrical and optical properties were investigated as a function of the deposition parameters and the optimum conditions were defined. The thin film exhibits approximately 80% transparency and a resistivity in the order of 2 x 10(-2) Ωcm. The electrical properties can be improved further with post-deposition annealing in vacuum, or with the increase in thickness which causes insignificant transmission losses. AZO nanoparticles can be used as a seed layer and affect the optical properties of the material. The optimized process results in good quality AZO films for their application as the transparent conductive oxide (TCO) layer in thin film solar cells.

Funding

The authors are grateful to EPSRC Supergen SuperSolar Hub for funding to support this project and to Innovnano SA for providing the AZO nanoparticles.

History

School

Mechanical, Electrical and Manufacturing Engineering

Published in

IEEE Photovoltaic Specialist Conference

Pages

? - ? (6)

Citation

ARNOU, P., BOWERS, J.W. and WALLS, J.M., 2014. Aluminium-doped zinc oxide deposited by ultrasonic spray pyrolysis for thin film solar cell applications. Presented at: 2014 40th IEEE Photovoltaic Specialists Conference (PVSC), Denver, USA, 8-13 June, pp.0308-0313.

Publisher

Version

SMUR (Submitted Manuscript Under Review)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.

Publication date

2014

Notes

This is a conference paper. © 2014 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redisitribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.