Studies on the Electrical and Optical Properties of High Quality Cuprous Oxide Material Produced by Thermal Oxidation for Solar Cell Applications

Abstract

Investigations were done into the structural, morphological, and opto-electrical properties of cuprous oxide. In order to create high-quality cuprous oxide materials, copper foil was thermally oxidised. This method worked well to create cuprous oxide films with a high degree of purity and big grain sizes. The X-ray diffraction (XRD) revealed that the films have a cubic structure with preferred (111) orientation at 2\(\theta\) angle of 36.51o. Scanning electron microscope (SEM) micrograph revealed that the material is rough on a micro scale with an average grain size of 0.68\(\mu\)m. The optical band gap energy for Cu2O was estimated to be 2.11eV. The low electrical resistivity of 2.59 x 102\(\Omega\)cm was calculated for Cu2O. The maximum power was found to be 1.84x10-4mWcm-2 for the cell without current collection grids while 2.61x10-4mWcm-2 was found to be the maximum power for the cell with current collection grid at constant illumination of 60Wm-2. The efficiencies and fill factors for the cells with and without current collection grids were found to be 3.07x10-4 % and 0.49, 4.35x10-4 % and 0.58 respectively. The above findings makes cuprous oxide a good material for photovoltaic applications.