As the demand for inorganic electronics grows, it is of great importance to develop materials and processes that outperform existing technologies in terms of efficiency, cost and sustainability. Chemical vapour deposition (CVD) is an efficient and industrially scalable process that produces conformal films of a desired material. At the forefront of inorganic materials chemistry lies the development of efficient, safe and low-cost photovoltaic (PV) devices. Thin film PV devices consist of multiple layers of materials which can be deposited via CVD. There is a need to replace the highly toxic cadmium sulfide buffer layer in copper indium gallium selenide (CIGS) and copper zinc tin sulfide (CZTS) solar cells and zinc oxysulfide has garnered attention as a safer alternative. Furthermore, its band gap can be easily modified by varying the oxygen to sulfur elemental ratio. Much of the literature has employed atomic layer deposition (ALD) as the technique for zinc oxysulfide film deposition, using H2S as the sulfur source. However, the CVD of this material for solar cell applications has not been reported. As CVD relies on precursor solubility, there are countless non-toxic compounds which incorporate sulfur that can be used as precursors to zinc oxysulfide. Presented here is the aerosol-assisted (AA)CVD of zinc oxysulfide thin films for the application of thin film photovoltaics. The compositional variation of zinc oxysulfide films from dual-source one-pot mixtures of zinc diethyldithiocarbamate and zinc acetate, as the sulfur and oxygen sources respectively, is explored through XRD, XPS, EDX and SEM studies. It may be beneficial to investigate the exact structural transformation that the varying of the O/S ratio has on this material as it may aid in further understanding of its functional properties.

Chemical vapour deposition of zinc oxysulfide for photovoltaics

2019 Fall National Meeting

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