Highly Diffuse Fluorine-doped SnO2 Thin Films for Photovoltaic Applications

In the last decades, polycrystalline fluorine-doped SnO2 (FTO) thin films have received increasing interest due to their promising application in a wide variety of devices such as gas sensors, coatings and electrodes for solar cells. FTO thin films exhibit good electro-optical properties and other important physical properties such as a high work function, good thermal stability… FTO thin films have already been shown to act as an efficient transparent electrode in solar cells.
In this work, FTO thin films were grown by ultrasonic spray pyrolysis on glass and flexible polymer substrates. The structural, electronic and optical properties of these FTO layers were thoroughly investigated. Our work focuses on a better understanding of their electro-optical properties, in terms for instance of electron scattering. We show that FTO layers (when combined with ZnO nanoparticles) exhibit haze factor as high as 60%, whilst maintaining very good electro-optical properties. The integration into solar cells is also presented.