Electrodeposition of CIGS on Metal Substrates

Abstract

The development of a low cost roll-to-roll production process for CIGS remains an attractive goal. In the present approach, the absorber is prepared by electrodeposition techniques, while molybdenum, copper or stainless steel (SS) are used as flexible substrates. Two electrodeposition routes are evaluated: sequential plating of Cu, In and Ga followed by Se evaporation is compared to simultaneous (= ternary) electrodeposition of Cu, In and Se. Ternary electrodeposition yields 7.5 % efficiency on stainless steel. The sequential process leads to 9.0 % cell efficiency on copper and on stainless steel substrates.

A High‐Efficiency Solution‐Deposited Thin‐Film Photovoltaic Device

“…Currently, these processing issues are primarily addressed for high-efficiency devices by using multistep vacuum-based techniques (e.g., evaporation or sputtering). [9][10][11][12] Several solution-based approaches have also been reported, including (with best power conversion efficiencies achieved) electrochemical deposition (7% for all elements deposited at once, 9% for deposition of metals followed by a separate hightemperature selenization step), [13][14][15] spray pyrolysis/spray chemical vapor deposition (CVD) ( 5%), [16,17] and nanoparticle-precursor deposition (14%). [18][19][20] Limitations of previously reported solution-based CIGS deposition approaches include: (i) incorporation of carbon, oxygen, and other impurities from the precursors or starting solutions; (ii) the need for multistep processing (e.g., a typical nanoparticle process involves making metal oxide nanoparticles, depositing the oxides as films, reducing the films to metals using a hightemperature reduction step, followed by high-temperature selenization); [19,20] (iii) the requirement for a high-temperature selenization/sulfurization step using toxic gases (e.g., H 2 Se) and/or a post-deposition cyanide-bath etch to achieve adequate grain growth and improve phase purity; and (iv) difficulty incorporating dopants such as Ga in a uniform and controllable fashion.…”

Applications of Electrochemistry in the Fabrication and Characterization of Thin‐Film Solar Cells

“…[86] have successfully deposited layers in this manner, albeit with a thermally evaporated Se capping layer on the Cu/In/Ga stack. In their case no details are given due to the industrial nature of the work, but device effi ciencies of 10.4% are reported [86] .…”

Properties of CuInxGa1−xSe2 thin films grown from electrodeposited precursors with different levels of selenium content

“…In this sense, electrochemical deposition is a simple and non-vacuum technique and has a natural advantage of large-area deposition [3]. Therefore, over the last two decades, there has been considerable work done on the growth of CIGS thin films using electrodeposition technique [4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11]. So far all electrodeposited (ED) CIGS films need a selenization step under a Se-containing atmosphere to recrystallize the films, as in most cases electrodeposition is employed at low temperature.…”