UFAS1 PLATFORM EVENTS, International Conference on Materials Science ICMS2018

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Electrodeposition of semiconductors for optoelectronic devices: Results on Cu2O thin films
Abdelmadjid Herbadji, Ibrahim Yaacoub Bouderbala, Loubna Mentar

Last modified: 2018-07-19

Abstract


Cuprous oxide (Cu2O) is an attractive material for applications in solar energy converting devices, it can be used as a p-type semiconductor material due to the Cu vacancies created in the crystal lattice during the growth with a direct band gap (Eg) of 1.9 to 2.2 eV [1]. Although the theoretical efficiency of Cu2O solar cells is about 18 %, and the best-reported efficiency is only 2.05% [2]. This material has been synthesized by different methods including chemical vapor deposition (CVD) [3], Sol-Gel [4], and electrochemical deposition [5,6]. Among these methods, electrodeposition is a simple and low-cost technique for preparing nanostructures of oxide semiconductors on conductive substrates. It provides advantages such as, low synthesis temperature, and large area deposition [7,8]. Many researchers using the electrodeposition method for the elaboration of Cu2O nanostructures only consider the effect of the precursor concentration or make a comparative study between precursors, forgetting that temperature has a considerable influence on the optical and structure of Cu2O.

In this work, we have electrodeposited a series of Cu2O thin films on FTO coated glass substrates in pH = 9.5 by using copper sulphate electrolyte through potentiostatic electrodeposition with different temperatures (40, 50, 60 and 70°C).  It was found that the optimum deposition temperature was 70°C. The electrochemical, structural, morphological and optical properties were characterized using Mott-Schottky plots (MS), photocurrent measurements (PC), X-ray diffraction (XRD), scanning electron, microscopy (MEB) and Ultraviolet and visible transmission Spectroscopy (UV-Vis), respectively.