Recent Development in Earth-Abundant Kesterite Materials and Their Applications
Institute for Materials Discovery, University College London, London WC1E 7JE, UK
*
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Sustainability 2020, 12(12), 5138; https://doi.org/10.3390/su12125138
Received: 31 May 2020 / Revised: 20 June 2020 / Accepted: 22 June 2020 / Published: 24 June 2020
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Emerging Photovoltaic Materials for High-Performance and High-Stable Photovoltaic Applications)
Kesterite Cu2ZnSnS4 (CZTS) has attracted attention as an earth-abundant alternative to commercially successful CIGS solar cells. CZTS exhibits decent optoelectrical properties while having excellent stability on top of being an earth-abundant, low-cost and non-toxic material. Therefore, in recent years, there has been a significant research effort to develop CZTS-based devices. The efficiency of CZTS solar cells reached 12.6% in 2013, and this was a remarkable achievement at the time. However, the efficiency of these devices has been stagnant since then while emerging technologies, most notably perovskite solar cells, keep breaking record after record. Currently, CZTS research focuses on discovering the secrets of material properties that hinder the efficiency of CZTS solar cells while branching out to develop alternative applications for this material. In this review, we summarize the interesting properties of CZTS as well as its promising applications, which include thin-film solar cells, charge-transfer layers in perovskite solar cells, and photoelectrochemical water splitting while briefly commenting on its other possible applications.
View Full-Text
Keywords:
kesterite; CZTS; thin-film solar cells; charge-transfer layer; photoelectrochemical water splitting
▼
Show Figures
Figure 1
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited
MDPI and ACS Style
Nazligul, A.S.; Wang, M.; Choy, K.L. Recent Development in Earth-Abundant Kesterite Materials and Their Applications. Sustainability 2020, 12, 5138. https://doi.org/10.3390/su12125138
AMA Style
Nazligul AS, Wang M, Choy KL. Recent Development in Earth-Abundant Kesterite Materials and Their Applications. Sustainability. 2020; 12(12):5138. https://doi.org/10.3390/su12125138
Chicago/Turabian StyleNazligul, Ahmet S., Mingqing Wang, and Kwang L. Choy 2020. "Recent Development in Earth-Abundant Kesterite Materials and Their Applications" Sustainability 12, no. 12: 5138. https://doi.org/10.3390/su12125138
Find Other Styles
Note that from the first issue of 2016, MDPI journals use article numbers instead of page numbers. See further details here.
