Electrodeposited CuSbSe₂ thin films based solar cells on various substrates

CuSbSe₂ is a promising absorber nano-material for thin-film solar cells, for its attractive photovoltaic properties, low cost, and environmentally friendly constituent elements. In this work, the interest was focused on the investigation of the effect of three types of substrates (FTO, ITO, and Mo) and deposition time on the characteristics of the electrodeposited films and on the efficiency of the CuSbSe₂-based PV cells. The adopted architecture for this is the typical of substrate/CuSbSe₂/CdS/i-ZnO/Al-ZnO. XRD reveals that CuSbSe₂ thin films deposited on different substrates are grown in orthorhombic CuSbSe₂ chalcostibite form (JCPDS: 98-041-8754), all with 65 nm crystallite size. However, the deposition time affects their preferential directions. SEM-EDX analysis shows that the sample deposited on ITO (45 min) has an almost stoichiometric composition with the lowest impurity content. Despite this, the FTO-based solar cell (60 min) shows the best efficiency (0.51%), compared to the ITO-based cell (0.12%), due to higher J_sc values.