Engineering crystal orientation of p-Cu₂O on heterojunction solar cells

ABSTRACT

The Cu₂O/AZO heterojunction solar cells were successfully constructed by synthesising p-Cu₂O layer upon AZO using the electrochemical deposition method. The p-Cu₂O nanostructures with different grain shape and preferred crystal orientation, including (100), (110) and (111) indicated by SEM and XRD, were obtained by controlling electrodeposition bath pH. The J–V characteristic shows that the performance of the Cu₂O/AZO heterojunction solar cells is found to be dependent on the crystal orientation of p-Cu₂O. Only the solar cell with Cu₂O (111) exhibits well-defined rectifying behaviour and good photoelectric conversion efficiency, which may due to the optimised energy band structure of Cu₂O (111)/AZO heterojunction solar cells . Furthermore, V_OC and J_SC were sharply increased by further optimising energy band structure through inserting the intrinsic ZnO layer between the Cu₂O (111) and AZO. Therefore, the results illustrated above may offer a helpful guidance to design and construct the high performance solar cell.

KEYWORDS:

• Crystal orientation
• Cu₂O
• heterojunction solar cell
• energy band structure

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

We thank the Education Department of Fujian Province (JA15140), Natural Science Foundation of Fujian Province of China (2012J01256, 2013J01174), and the Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 11374052) for financial support.