Preparation & Characterization of Solar Energy Materials

Although efforts have been made to develop new Transparent & Conducting Oxides (TCOs) with potential for improving performance, there have been very few concerted efforts. TCOs production by methods like Sputtering, Sol-gel and Chemical Vapour Deposition have proved to be expensive and their products are non-durable. The need for eventual large-scale and cheap manufacture of TCOs must be carefully considered.There has been a shortage of reports on successful fabrication of p-type materials.Given the inverse dependence of the mobility on effective mass, one may expect that electrical and optical performance of p-type TCOs to be inferior to those of n-type films with their much lower electron effective masses. This was proved otherwise in this research. Lack of enough and cheap fabricated materials (especially of p-type) and of high performance pose the demand for more research to be carried out to either improve on the available ones or come up with new TCOs to meet technological demands. Some of these gaps have been addressed in this book by co-doping Tin Oxide with Aluminium and Sulphur; making it essential for university student researching in Material Science for Solar Energy