Preparation and characterization of CuO thin films by SILAR method for solar cell applications

Abstract

The increased global demand of energy and environmental concerns due to the use of fossil fuels speeds up the research on new renewable energy sources Among the various renewable energy sources the solar energy is the inexhaustible and clean energy available in plenty The energy received on earth from sun is about 1.8 × 1011 MW it is very higher than the earth consumes now Semiconducting materials in the form of solar cells can be used to harvest the sun s energy Copper oxide understood well in early 1900 is one of the interesting and efficient semiconducting material that can be advantageously used in solar cell technology However the use of silicon and germanium based semiconductors has slowed down the interest of copper oxide Due to the lack of improvement in the silicon solar cell research and increased cost of silicon solar cells the transition metal oxides has recently attracted attention of researchers due to their attractive electrical and optical properties Among the various semiconducting oxides copper oxide is quite promising for use in solar cells It exists in two forms as cupric oxide (CuO) and cuprous oxide (Cu2O) Copper oxide has attractive features such as nontoxicity high abundance and ease processability which are more useful for solar cell applications. It is an ideal material for photovoltaic conversion as it has direct band gap between 1.2 -1.7 eV which more suitable for the solar region Moreover the band gap can be easily tuned by choosing the deposition method and conditions It acts as a p-type semiconductor due to copper vacancies newline