Insight into the core–shell structures of Cu–In–S microspheres

A biomolecule-assisted, cost-efficient route for growing tunable CuInS2 films for green energy application

“…Aerwards, they placed an FTO substrate in a Teon-lined stainless steel autoclave and kept it in an oven for 12 h at 160 C. This procedure was modied in our previous work and a lower temperature was found to be sufficient. 15,16 In the present work we changed the sulfur source from thioacetamide to L-cysteine. Three lms were prepared using different concentrations of reactants, hereaer referred to as lms A, B and C (see Table 1).…”

“…Therefore, synthesis of CuInS 2 lms via cost-efficient methods such as chemical bath deposition, 8 successive ionic layer deposition, 9 microwave assisted growth, 10 hot-injection, 11 solgel methods 12 and mild solvothermal synthesis routes 13,14 has attracted increasing attention. In previous reports, 15,16 we have presented the synthesis of CuInS 2 thin lms and microspheres using a one-step, cost-efficient solvothermal method that had been developed by Peng et al 13 and further modied in our studies. This method makes it possible to directly grow thin lms on a suitable substrate without the need to deposit the material aer synthesis.…”

“…Depending on the reagent stoichiometry and thermal treatments, we were able to synthesize CuInS 2 lms with different thicknesses and morphologies, using thioacetamide as the sulfur source. 15,16 However, thioacetamide is a toxic and carcinogenic substance. Hence, to prepare CuInS 2 thin lms via a non-toxic route, we changed the sulfur source to the biomolecule L-cysteine, an amino acid.…”

Photocatalytic activity of CuInS2 nanoparticles synthesized via a simple and rapid microwave heating process

“…In the photocatalysis, it has been explored as a photocatalyst for H 2 evolution [14,15,24,25], organic pollutant degradation [16,26,27], and nitrate ion reduction [17,18]. Hydro/solvothermal methods have been used to synthesize CuInS 2 nanoparticles [28][29][30][31][32]. However, these methods generally require expensive and complicated equipment, long periods of reaction time and high consumption of an electrical energy.…”

Photochemically deposited and post annealed copper indium disulphide thin films

“…Copper indium sulfide (CIS) is considered as a promising absorber material in thin film photovoltaics [8], because of its higher absorption coefficient (10 5 cm À1 ), direct band gap nearly close to ideal solar cell bandgap (1.52 eV) and nontoxicity [6,[9][10][11]. Based on detailed literature survey the synthesis of CuInS 2 shows different types of morphologies, such as flakes [12], nanoparticles [13,14], nano rods [15], nanotubes [3], foam-like nanocrystallites [16], flower vase like nanostructures [17] and microspheres [18,19]. For device applications CIS films were deposited by various deposition methods such as chemical bath deposition (CBD) [20,21], chemical vapor deposition (CVD) [22], electrochemical deposition (ED) [5,23,24], molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) [25], flash evaporation [26], spray pyrolysis [27][28][29], reactive magnetron sputtering [30], solvothermal [31], successive ionic layer adsorption and reaction (SILAR) [32], sol-gel [33] and photochemical deposition (PCD) [34].…”