European researchers have developed a simple thermodynamic method that can predict whether a substance can withstand high temperatures, which can be used to produce conventional thin films for photovoltaic devices. This new approach could help scientists search for better energy materials. Jonathan Scragg of Uppsala University in Sweden and some of his colleagues from the University of Bath and the University of Luxembourg in the UK published their results on April 24 "Thermodynamic Aspect soft the Synthesis of Thin-Film Materials for Solar Cells" in the "ChemPhysChem" magazine. "There are a lot of things to consider as you search for the ideal materials to use in solar cells," Scragg said. "The material must be very efficient at converting light into electricity, should not contain any rare, expensive or hazardous raw materials, and must be easy to manufacture and of high quality." However, most existing inorganic non-silicon thin film solar cell technologies , either toxic substances are used, such as cadmium telluride (CdTe: cadmiumtelluride), or relatively rare substances, such as copper indium gallium selenide (CIGSe: copper indium gallium selenide). Therefore, many researchers around the world are looking for alternative materials to overcome these limitations. "We're facing a huge problem," Scragg said. "Nature provides so many different materials that it is impossible to test every one of them. We introduce a method that greatly simplifies this problem." During the manufacturing process, solar cell materials must be heated to very high temperatures, This step, called annealing, allows them to crystallize to the required quality. However, many materials cannot withstand such high temperatures and will crumble and are simply not suitable for use. Scragg and colleagues have now found a way to determine beforehand whether a substance will be able to withstand the high temperatures generated during production. They predicted that during heat treatment, the reaction occurs over several layers of multicomponent semiconductor compounds, using different substrates, and showed that annealing conditions can be controlled to maximize the stability and quality of the material. Scientists studied different substances such as copper indium gallium selenide (CIGSe), copper zinc tin selenide (CZTSe), and other less well-known ternary and quaternary semiconductors. Scrag believes the new approach could go a long way toward finding better absorbent materials. "There are a lot of alternative materials out there, some very promising and some that may never meet the requirements of solar cells. Only a few of these alternative materials have the time and resources needed to develop them. To a high enough level. Rather than focusing on a single material, we are taking a broader approach, providing a way to identify which materials may be useful and which have fundamental limitations," he said.

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