Investigation of opto-electrical and structural properties of atmospheric pressure chemical vapor deposition of fluorine-doped tin oxide

Abstract

The atmospheric pressure chemical vapor deposition (APCVD) process for the deposition on FTO is considered one of the most complex processes in the HyET Solar production process. An increase in the deposition speed can increase the roll-to-roll foil speed which can directly translate to lowering production costs, furthermore increasing throughput. In this thesis several experiments were performed aimed at improving opto-electrical performance while moving to higher deposition speed. However using a production machine for the experiments leads to material consumption. Henceforth, a lab-scale research tool was designed for material deposition. Thereby, optimizing the recipe and investigating the corresponding material growth can be done faster and this has been demonstrated using the lab-scale deposition tool. This tool also facilitates the investigation in different stages of growth to have a deeper understanding of each process parameter, thus making it possible to formulate the correct parameters and facilitate the knowledge transfer to the production APCVD machine.