Cleaning of Fluorine doped Tin Oxide (FTO) Glass for Electrochemical deposition.
Piranha would dissolve FTO. I prefer not to use acetone as it could adsorb onto the electrode and produce spots of non deposition. My procedure consists in:
wash the substrate with cotton and neutral liquid detergent, then rinse thoroughly with another cotton wuth lots of water, then with ethanol twice in the US bath some 30 seconds and finally with DI water twice in the US barh, 30 secs. Dry with nitrogen. If you did cut the FTOsubstrate, US could break the borders and create glass needles that will scratch your FTO then spoiling the depodition. Take care about this. Hope its useful.
You can try ultrasonic cleaning with ethanol, acetone and dry water. As I have used many times in case of ITO.
Piranha would dissolve FTO. I prefer not to use acetone as it could adsorb onto the electrode and produce spots of non deposition. My procedure consists in:
wash the substrate with cotton and neutral liquid detergent, then rinse thoroughly with another cotton wuth lots of water, then with ethanol twice in the US bath some 30 seconds and finally with DI water twice in the US barh, 30 secs. Dry with nitrogen. If you did cut the FTOsubstrate, US could break the borders and create glass needles that will scratch your FTO then spoiling the depodition. Take care about this. Hope its useful.
Actually it is not, piranha will etch the FTO.
We had several problems with the above mentioned procedures when cleaning ito. There is two more things that can be done. One is an oxygen plasma, thou im unvertain if it attacks the FTO surface or not. But we have good experience with using a thin KOH etch to clean ito surfaces. That should actually work fine on FTO, too.
RCA treatment is also mild cleaning process for ITO and FTO and removes organic impurities from the surface. 1: 1: 5 volume ratio of NH3, 30% H2O2 and H2O. Heat at 70-80 C for 15 min. After that rinse in DI water for few times.
Degreasing in hot (~60C) saturated KOH in isopropanol is an efficient cleaning protocol for FTO.
boiling in acetone at 150 C sounds very dangerous! you shoudn't do that if you do not exactly know what you are dooing. Acetone gases are extremely enflameable.
I disagree on using RCA process or any solvent to clean it, mostly because it leaves adsorbed traces that would cause spots of non deposition. RCA works fine when used in vacuum processes. We had that problem in anodizing Cu. KOH etching is very suitable as O. Niitso anmd T. Deuschmann mention, it activates the surface and produces more adherent and uniform deposits. It is possible to pass some 6-7 Ampers thru the FTO (or ITO) substrate in the 1M KOH solution at room temperature during 2 minutes to further activate the surface.
Sonication of FTO substrates by keeping it in soap solution, ethanol and distilled water followed by drying at 100°C has been reported by researchers. It was found that heat treatment effectively removes organics compared to the non heat treated process.
Use Ultrasonicator for cleaning. first in tricholoroethylene, liquid detergent, DI water, acetone and isopropanol. with 10 mins in each solution. i use this technique for cleaning FTO substrates for Perovskite solar cells
http://techinstro.blogspot.com/2016/11/how-to-maintain-clean-fto-coated-glass.html
please check the link for cleaning procedure.
As I have gone thru' the above conversation, I am not sure why F. Caballero-Briones recommend not to use by RCA.
Usually many papers suggest to do acetone, D.I water cleaning.
- Badges
- Science topic