Effect of the cadmium ion source on the structural and optical properties of chemical bath deposited CdS thin films

The chemical bath deposition (CBD) technique has been successfully used to deposit cadmium sulphide from cadmium chloride and cadmium acetate as the cadmium ion source and thiourea as the sulphur source on both glass microscope slide and indium tin oxide coated glass substrates. Various properties of the films such as surface morphology, crystallinity, optical properties and resistivitiy have been investigated. XRD patterns reveal that the CdS films deposited from cadmium chloride have an hexagonal structure. Their preferential orientation changes from (002) to (100) with the thermal annealing. Films deposited from cadmium acetate are amorphous but improve their crystallinity with annealing. SEM analysis shows that the grains of the as deposited films are randomly shaped and appear to be bigger in the case of the CdS prepared from cadmium chloride. The optical transmission of the layers are in the 70–80 % range for wavelength above the band gap absorption which makes them more appropriate as window material in heterojunction solar cells.