SnS Thin Films Prepared by Chemical Spray Pyrolysis at Different Substrate Temperatures for Photovoltaic Applications

Abstract

The preparation and analysis of morphological, structural, optical, vibrational and compositional properties of tin monosulfide (SnS) thin films deposited on glass substrate by chemical spray pyrolysis (CSP) is reported herein. The growth conditions were evaluated to reduce the presence of residual phases different to the SnS orthorhombic phase. X-ray diffraction (XRD) spectra revealed the polycrystalline nature of the SnS films with orthorhombic structure and a preferential grain orientation along the (111) direction. At high substrate temperature (450 ºC), a crystalline phase corresponding to the Sn2S3 phase was observed. Raman spectroscopy confirmed the dominance of the SnS phase and the presence of an additional Sn2S3 phase. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) images reveal that the SnS film morphology depends on the substrate temperature. Between 250 °C and 350 ºC, SnS films were shaped as rounded grains with some cracks between them, while at substrate temperatures above 400 ºC films were denser and more compact. Energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDS) analysis showed that the stoichiometry of sprayed SnS films improved with the increase of substrate temperature and atomic force microscopy (AFM) micrographs showed films well covered at 350 ºC resulting in a rougher and bigger grain size. Optical and electrical measurements showed that the optical bandgap and the resistivity decreased when the substrate temperature increased, and smaller values, 1.46 eV and 60Ω.cm, respectively, were attained at 450 ºC. These SnS thin films could be used as an absorber layer for the development of tandem solar cell devices due to their high absorbability in the visible region with optimum bandgap energy.

Influence of Thin Film Quality Control Parameters on the Properties of Spray Coated Tin Monosulfide Thin Films for Photovoltaic Application

“…2). All the films exhibited preferential (111) plane orientation, which suggests generally, reported orthorhombic structure [12][13][14]. The lower substrate temperature attributed secondary phase of SnS 2 , whereas at higher temperature a secondary phase of Sn 2 S 3 was observed.…”

Effect of carrier gas pressure on structural, optical and photovoltaic properties of tin sulphide thin films prepared by nebulizer spray pyrolysis method

“…Tin sulphide (SnS) belonging to group IV-VI semiconducting chalcogenides considered as one of the most successful materials for solar photovoltaic (PV) and optoelectronic applications [1]. Albeit its excellent achievements, some problems remain to be solved.…”

“…Many different methods have been utilized for the fabrication of SnS layers such as atmospheric pressure chemical vapour deposition [10], chemical bath deposition [11], spray pyrolysis [12], electrodeposition [13], thermal evaporation [14], electron beam evaporation [15], d.c. magnetron sputtering [16], atomic layer deposition [17] and successive ionic layer adsorption and reaction [1,18]. Knowledge about the material and well known device designs pave the way to SnS related solar devices with efficiency > 10% [8].…”

Atomic force microscopy studies on sulfur-, selenium- and tellurium-based metal chalcogenide thin films: A review

“…There are a number of papers that report the results of morphological, structural, compositional, functional group, and optical characterization of thin films. These films were characterized using range of characterization techniques such as X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (Lisco et al, 2015;Meng et al, 2015;Zhang et al, 2001;Subramanian et al, 2001), scanning electron microscopy (Remigijus et al, 2012;Anuar et al, 2010;Yazid et al, 2009;Murilo and Lucia, 2016;Salh et al, 2017;Amira and Hager, 2017), X-ray diffraction (Zulkefly et al, 2010;Saravanan et al, 2008;Kamoun et al, 2007;Ho et al, 2010;Sall et al, 2017;Kiran et al, 2017;Anitha et al, 2017;Kassim et al, 2011), transmission electron microscopy (Chen et al, 2016;Mukherjee et al, 2016a;Gallardo et al, 2016;Ghribi et al, 2016), energy dispersive X-ray analysis (Jelas et al, 2011;Deshmukh et al, 2017;Khan et al, 2017;Bakiyaraj and Dhanasekaran, 2013), Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (Sahuban et al, 2016;Dedova et al, 2005;Taj and Tayyaba, 2012), and UV-Visible spectrophotometer Thirumavalavan et al, 2015;Ersin and Suleyman, 2015;Ramesh et al, 2014).…”