Engineering of window layer cadmium sulphide and zinc sulphide thin films for solar cell applications

Abstract

The synthesis of cadmium sulfide (CdS) and zinc sulfide (ZnS) thin films materials was carried out in three electrode configurations on electrically conductive fluorine doped tin oxide (FTO) substrates. The materials were synthesized due to their wide range of applications in photovoltaic devices. Despite the potentials of the materials in heterojunction-based devices, little efforts have been made to place the materials side by side to be able to suggest the most environmentally friendly with good potentials for solar cell applications. In this paper, we synthesized and characterized the materials using electrodeposition (ED) technique for materials’ synthesis, X-Ray Diffractometer (XRD) for structural properties, Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) for morphological properties, Energy Dispersive X-ray (EDX) with X-Ray Fluorescence (XRF) for elemental composition and Ultraviolet Visible spectrophotometer (UV–vis) for optical properties. The XRD results show an increase in the crystallite sizes of the materials with increasing cathodic voltages from 10.30 to 15.20 nm; the SEM results show evenly distributed and adherent materials on the substrate; the EDX and XRF results show the qualitative and quantitative elements present; and the UV-vis results show a decrease in the energy band gap with increasing cathodic voltage of both CdS and ZnS thin films from 2.53 to 2.29 eV and 3.78–3.56 eV, respectively.

Keywords

• CdS/ZnS thin Films
• Window layer materials
• Solar cell
• Three electrode configurations