FTO - Fluorine-doped tin oxide

Thin films of CdS, deposited by chemical bath deposition (CBD) onto films of fluorine-doped tin oxide/glass (glass/FTO) substrates were prepared and investigated for photoelectrochemical conversion (PEC) of light into electricity. Knowing the hazardous nature of CdS, the focal theme of this work was to modify the electrodes by simple economic ways to maximize their conversion efficiency and minimize their degradation under PEC conditions. This was to avoid leaching out of hazardous Cd2+ ions. Different parameters have been investigated for this purpose. Multi-deposition preparation, redox couple, and electrode etching affected electrode PEC characteristics. Consistent with earlier literature, annealing the electrode enhanced its conversion efficiency and stability. On the other hand, effect of cooling rate of pre-annealed CdS electrodes, prepared by CBD, on their PEC characteristics has been investigated here for the first time. Controlling the cooling rate was one major factor that affected CdS surface morphology, conversion efficiency and stability under PEC conditions. The major recommendation coming out here is that PEC characteristics of CdS thin film electrodes can be significantly enhanced by pre-annealing the electrode at ∼250 °C followed by its slow cooling.

A variant of the sol–gel technique known as cation complexation is used to prepare a nanocrystalline Gd0.1Ce0.9O1.95 (GDC) solid solution. A range of techniques including thermal analysis (TGA/DTA), X-ray diffraction, specific surface area determination (BET) and electron microscopy (SEM and TEM) are employed to characterise the GDC powders. GDC calcined at 500 °C is found to have an average crystallite size of 11 nm. Specific surface areas are found to be 29.7 m2 g−1 for the as-calcined powder and 57.5 m2 g−1 after ball milling at 400 rpm. Dense ceramic pellets are prepared from unmilled and ball-milled GDC powders employing different thermal treatments. Their electrical properties are studied by impedance spectroscopy. Those samples sintered at 1300 °C for 30 h (starting from ball-milled powders) exhibit the highest density (96% of theoretical density) and the highest total ionic conductivity (1.91 × 10−2 S cm−1 at 600 °C).

A two-stage approach that combines electrodeposition with redox replacement has been used to deposit Pt/Pb nanoparticles on fluorine doped tin oxide (FTO) glass. The deposition takes place by cycling between the two steps in a single electrolyte bath containing both Pb2+ and Pt2+ ions. In the first step, Pb is electrodeposited on FTO glass at a potential E1 and in

A novel and simple chemical method based on sol-gel processing was proposed to deposit metastable orthorhombic tin oxide (SnOx) thin films on glass substrates at room temperature. The resultant samples are labeled according to the solvents used: ethanol (SnO-EtOH), isopropanol (SnO-IPA) and methanol (SnO-MeOH). The variations in the structural, morphological and optical properties of the thin films deposited using different solvents were characterized by X-ray diffraction, atomic force microscopy, Raman spectroscopy, Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy, UV-vis spectroscopy and photoluminescence (PL) analysis. The XRD patterns confirm that all the films, irrespective of the solvents used for preparation, were polycrystalline in nature and contained a mixed phases of tin (II) oxide and tin (IV) oxide in a metastable orthorhombic crystal structure. FTIR spectra confirmed the presence of Sn=O and Sn-O in all of the samples. PL spectra showed a violet emission band centered at 380 nm (3.25 eV) for all of the solvents. The UV-vis spectra indicated a maximum absorption band shown at 332 nm and the highest average transmittance around 97% was observed for the SnO-IPA and SnO-MeOH thin film samples. The AFM results show variations in the grain size with solvent. The structural and optical properties of the SnO thin films indicate that this method of fabricating tin oxide is promising and that future work is warranted to analyze the electrical properties of the films in order to determine the viability of these films for various transparent conducting oxide applications.

An experimental study of spectrally selective reflector (SSR) characteristics of pyrolytically deposited fluorine doped tin oxide on aluminium is reported. It is shown that a pyrolytically deposited doped tin oxide layer offers good spectral selectivity to the aluminium surface. High solar reflectance is obtained for wavelengths below 1.1 μm and low solar reflectance for wavelengths above 1.1 μm. The spectral selectivity is highly dependent on the preparation conditions, doping and thickness of the films and spectral selectivity was significantly improved if the aluminium surface was initially anodized. The results demonstrate a potential for producing SSR’s for silicon based solar cell concentrator applications.

Layers of titania are the critical components in sensitized photovoltaics. The transfer of electrons occurs from the dye molecule to the external circuit through a transparent conducting oxide, namely fluorine-doped tin oxide (FTO). Porosity, interparticle connectivity, and the titania films' defects play a vital role in assessing the dye-sensitized solar cells' (DSSCs) performance. The conventional methods typically take several hours to fabricate these layers. This is a significant impediment for the large-scale manufacture of DSSCs. This step can be reduced to a few hours by a microwave sintering process and may facilitate the rapid fabrication of the critical layers for sensitized photovoltaics, thus, boosting the prospects for the commercialization of these devices. In the present study, we aimed to perform different heat treatments (conventional and microwave) on the titania films with different temperatures to understand the phase formation, transmittance, and porosity without losing the titania's interparticle connectivity. The solar cell performance of microwave-sintered titania films is comparatively higher than that of conventionally sintered titania films.

Thin films of fluorine-doped tin oxide (SnO2:F) on glass were prepared by spray pyrolysis technique using stannous chloride (SnCl2) and ammonium fluoride (NH4F) as precursors. The as-prepared films were characterized for their structural and electrical properties and are discussed in detail in this article. The surface morphology studies revealed that the films are grainy and the roughness of undoped films

... View Within Article. SEM images were taken for SILAR deposited CuI on glass and FTO (Fig. 3) to study the surface morphology. A better surface coverage is observed for CuI on FTO (Fig. 3b) than on glass (Fig. 3a). The average crystallites size is found between 50 and 100 nm. ...