Morphology and properties evolution of kesterite Cu2ZnSnS4 microfibers synthesized via electrospinning method

Abstract

Solar cells and related key materials are still among the most interesting researching field. In this work, kesterite Cu 2 ZnSnS 4 (CZTS) cross-linked fibers and dense films, which are promising candidates for active layers used in the third generation solar cells, are developed via electrospinning following sulfurization at high temperature. Morphology dependence and properties evolution are investigated for the samples obtained by sulfurization in the temperature range of 450-600°C. Samples are characterized by scanning electron microscopy, energy-dispersive spectroscopy, X-ray diffraction, Raman and X-ray photoelectronic spectroscopy, and UV-Vis absorbance spectra. It is found that, with the sulfurization temperature increasing, morphologies develop from isolated CZTS fibers to interconnected fibers, and finally forming a submicron flake composed dense films, accompanying a band gap evolution from 1.49 to 1.44 eV, just by simply adjusting the solutes concentration and vulcanization parameters.

Study on the Optimization of Cu-Zn-Sn-O to Prepare Cu2ZnSnS4 Thin Film via a Nano Ink Coating Method

“…The preparation of this thin film material using non-toxic and abundant elements makes it a suitable candidate to replace CIGS as a thin film solar cell (Washio et al, 2012;Azmi et al, 2021;Kaur et al, 2021;Li X. M. et al, 2021;Ramirez-Ceja et al, 2021). A variety of experimental methods to prepare CZTS thin film materials have been developed, such as electrospinning (Bi et al, 2015;Mu et al, 2015), nano ink method (Altowairqi et al, 2019;Liu et al, 2020), sol-gel (Dong et al, 2017;Jacob et al, 2021), sputtering (Lu et al, 2018;Pandharkar et al, 2021) and electrodeposition (Khattak et al, 2019;Demir, 2021), and so forth. Kim et al mixed CZTS ink with 2-methoxyethanol, with the highest efficiency of 8.17% (Kim et al, 2014).…”