Affiliations 

  • 1 Department of Electrical, Electronics and System, FKAB, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM) 43600 Bangi Selangor Malaysia asmaa.soheil@yahoo.com
  • 2 Department of Chemical Engineering Technology, Yanbu Industrial College Yanbu Al-Sinaiyah City 41912 Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
  • 3 Al-Muthanna University 66001 Samawah Al Muthanna Iraq
  • 4 Department of Chemical Engineering and Petroleum Industries, Al-Mustaqbal University College Babylon 51001 Iraq
  • 5 Solar Energy Research Institute (SERI), Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM) 43600 Bangi Selangor Malaysia
  • 6 Applied Sciences Department, University of Technology Baghdad Iraq
  • 7 Department of Physics, College of Education, University of Al-Qadisiyah Al-Diwaniyah Al-Qadisiyah 58002 Iraq
  • 8 Department of Chemical Engineering, University of Technology Baghdad Iraq
  • 9 Imam Abdulrahman-bin Fiasal University Eastern Region Dammam Saudi Arabia
RSC Adv, 2022 Oct 17;12(46):29613-29626.
PMID: 36321103 DOI: 10.1039/d2ra04790j

Abstract

A high-quality buffer layer serves as one of the most significant issues that influences the efficiency of solar cells. Doping in semiconductors is an important strategy that can be used to control the reaction growth. In this study, the influence of Ag doping on the morphological, optical and electrical properties of CdS thin films have been obtained. Herein, we propose the mechanism of CdS film formation with and without Ag ions, and we found that changes in the reaction of preparing CdS by the chemical bath deposition (CBD) method cause a shift in the geometric composition of the CdS film. XRD showed that the position of peaks in the doped films are displaced to wider angles, indicating a drop in the crystal lattice constant. The optical analysis confirmed direct transition with an optical energy gap between 2.10 and 2.43 eV. The morphological studies show conglomerates with inhomogeneously distributed spherical grains with an increase of the Ag ratio. The electrical data revealed that the annealed Ag-doped CdS with 5% Ag has the highest carrier concentration (3.28 × 1015 cm-3) and the lowest resistivity (45.2 Ω cm). According to the results, the optimal Ag ratio was obtained at Ag 5%, which encourages the usage of CdS in this ratio as an efficient buffer layer on photovoltaic devices.

* Title and MeSH Headings from MEDLINE®/PubMed®, a database of the U.S. National Library of Medicine.