SILAR deposition and characterization of ZnO films for numerical investigation as electron transport layer in solar cells

The SILAR method of thin film deposition has attracted the scientific community over the years due to its easiness, low cost, availability of room temperature deposition, and more over due to the variation in properties of thin films available by varying deposition parameters.This work is carried out in a way to comprehensively compare two ZnO thin film samples prepared from precursor media with Zinc Acetate (S1) and Zinc Chloride(S2) salts deposited by SILAR method in Perovskite Solar cell applications. The XRD, FTIR, Raman, FESEM, and UV-Visible analysis were carried out for identifying the structural, morphological, and optical quality of these samples. The role of these samples as Electron Transport Layer (ETL) in Perovskite Solar cell were identified using General purpose PhotoVoltaic Device model (GPVDM) simulation software which is well adapted for studying Solar cell architecture. It provided the output Solar cell parameters like Jsc, Voc, FF, PCE, etc and by varying the active layer and Hole Transport Layer (HTL) thicknesses, the optimized efficiency of devices with samples S1 and S2 were obtained as 21.88% and 21.96%.The results showed that SILAR-synthesized ZnO thin films could be potential candidates for ETL applications in Perovskite Solar cells.