Substrate influences on the properties of SnS thin films deposited by chemical spray pyrolysis technique for photovoltaic applications

Abstract

The present paper reports on Tin Monosulphide (SnS) thin films elaborated by the Chemical Spray Pyrolysis (CSP) technique onto various substrates as simple glass, ITO-and Mo-coated glass in order to study the influence of substrates on the physical and chemical properties of SnS thin films. The structural analysis revealed that all films are crystallized in orthorhombic structure with (111) as the sole preferential direction without secondary phases. In addition, films prepared onto pure glass exhibits better crystallization compared to films deposited onto coated-glass substrates. Raman spectroscopy analysis confirms the results obtained from XRD with modes corresponding well to SnS single crystal orthorhombic ones (47, 65, 94, 160, 186, and 219 cm -1 ) without any additional parasite secondary phase like Sn 2 S 3 or SnS 2 . FESEM revealed that all films have cornflake like particles surface morphology and EDS analysis showed the presence of sulphur and tin with nearly stoichiometric ratio in films deposited onto pure glass. High surface roughness and large grains have been observed in film deposited onto glass. From optical spectroscopy it is inferred that band gap energy of SnS/glass and SnS/ITO were 1.64 eV and 1.82 eV, respectively.2

Opto-electrical characterisation of In-doped SnS thin films for photovoltaic applications

“…The scan area was 8 µm x 8 µm wit 512 x 512 resolution. Films have irregular structure with longitudinal type of grains, which was already observed in spray pyrolised SnS thin films [10]. The average grain size and the average roughness height are presented in Table 1.…”

“…Here we investigated SnS thin films made by a spray pyrolysis [9,10] -a simple, inexpensive and versatile technique suitable for industrial scale production. In this case, the obtained so far efficiencies are below 2% [3].…”

Optical and structural-chemistry of SnS nanocrystals prepared by thermal decomposition of bis(N-di-isopropyl-N-octyl dithiocarbamato)tin(II) complex for promising materials in solar cell applications

“…Meanwhile, the molecular precursors compounds such as tin or organotin dithiocarbamates have received tremendous attention in their potential applications in non-linear optical materials, biology, industry, agriculture, chemistry and some have been found to be pharmacologically active (Muthalib et al 2011;Awang et al 2016). Apart from the singlesource molecular precursor (SSMP) method our research group has previously reported (Mbese and Ajibade 2017;Mbese and Ajibade 2018), researchers have synthesized SnS nanocrystals using dual source precursors methods such as thermal evaporation (Shao et al 2017;Kawano et al 2015), spray pyrolysis (Sall et al 2016;Akbari and Rozati 2015), electrodeposition (Kafashan et al 2017;Ichimura et al 2000), radiofrequency (RF) sputtering (Banai et al 2016;Seol et al 2003), sonochemical method (Park et al 2014;Henry et al 2015), electron beam (EB) evaporation (Zhao et al 2018) and chemical bath deposition (Al-Shakban et al 2019;Kevin et al 2015a, b). The advantage of using SSMP is that, precursor complexes are stoichiometric synthesized to contain the desired elements so that precursor complexes thermally decompose to yield materials of specific compositions.…”

Influence of Thin Film Quality Control Parameters on the Properties of Spray Coated Tin Monosulfide Thin Films for Photovoltaic Application

“…Several techniques have been employed for preparing SnS films namely: SILAR (successive ionic layer adsorption and reaction) [5], chemical bath deposition (CBD) [6], electron beam evaporation [7], Spray pyrolysis [8], etc. Among these techniques, spray pyrolysis is a versatile and low-cost one.…”