Identification and development of new metal-oxide thin-film photovoltaic absorber materials

虽然在过去几年中，光伏发电的成本已经显著下降，但提高吸收率仍然是一个优先事项。利用广域沉积工艺生产的低成本薄膜吸收材料有可能进一步大幅降低光伏发电的成本。开发有效的氧化物基吸收剂可以方便地构建坚固、稳定和非常低成本的设备，这些设备可以使用现有的工业上适用的广域沉积技术进行沉积。p型金属氧化物的开发已经投入了大量的研究工作，无论是作为吸收剂还是作为透明触点，但主要是由于大多数金属氧化物的典型电子特性，迄今为止取得的成功很小。因此，该项目旨在确定和优化n型氧化物吸收材料，并额外关注组成元素的地球丰度。材料开发将使用独特的组合溅射沉积工艺进行，允许快速探索成分空间，并为轻松确定最佳材料参数提供有效手段。

Although the cost of photovoltaics has dropped remarkably over the last few years, increasing the rate of uptake remains a priority. Low-cost thin-film absorber materials which can be produced using wide-area deposition processes have the potential to dramatically reduce the cost of photovoltaics even further. Development of effective oxide-based absorbers could enable the facile construction of robust, stable and very low-cost devices which could be deposited using existing industrially applicable wide-area deposition techniques. Significant research effort has gone into the development of p-type metal oxides, both as absorbers and as transparent contacts, but primarily due to the electronic properties typical of most metal oxides minimal success has so far been achieved. This project therefore aims to identify and optimise n-type oxide absorber materials, with an additional focus on Earth-abundance of the constituent elements. Materials development will be carried out using a unique combinatorial sputter deposition process allowing for rapid exploration of the compositional space and providing an effective means for easy identification of optimum materials parameters.