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

尽管过去几年来光化学品的成本显著下降，但提高吸收率仍然是一个优先事项。低成本的薄膜吸收材料，可以使用大面积沉积工艺生产，有可能显着降低成本的光致发光，甚至进一步。有效的氧化物基吸收剂的开发可以使得能够容易地构造坚固、稳定和非常低成本的器件，这些器件可以使用现有的工业上适用的广域沉积技术来沉积。大量的研究工作已经投入到p型金属氧化物的开发中，既作为吸收体又作为透明接触体，但主要是由于大多数金属氧化物的典型电子性质，迄今为止取得的成功很少。因此，该项目旨在识别和优化n型氧化物吸收剂材料，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，并提供一种有效的方法，便于识别最佳材料参数。

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.