In this work, thin films of aluminum doped ZnO (AZO) were deposited on ultrasonically cleaned glass substrates by sol-gel process using dip and spin coating techniques. For this purpose, Zinc acetate dihydrate, aluminum nitrate nonahydrate, ethanol and mono ethanolamine were employed as precursor, dopant, solvent and stabilizer, respectively. X-ray diffraction, UV–vis, photoluminescence, 4-point probe and Van der pauw techniques were investigated for the characterization of the prepared AZO thin films. X-ray-analysis revealed that all the prepared films have hexagonal wurtzite structure with a relative preferential orientation along the c-axis and the lattice parameters are close to the standard values reported in literature. UV–vis spectroscopy showed that the average value of the films’ transmittance in the visible region is found to be around 85% and the gap ranges in the interval [3.15 eV–3.30 eV]. The photoluminescence spectrum only showed the UV peak while the broad band of the visible region was completely vanished. The electrical measurements indicate that sol-gel methods provide relatively high resistivities compared to those obtained with physical vapor deposition (PVD) techniques.

A new equivalent model of the induction motor with turn to turn fault on one phase has been developed. This model has been used to establish two schemes to estimate the severity of the short circuit fault. In the first scheme, the faulty model is considered as an observer, where a correction of an error between the measured and the estimated currents is the kernel of the fault severity estimator. However, to develop the second method, the model was required only in the training process of an artificial neural network (ANN). Since stator faults have a signature on symmetrical components of phase currents, the magnitudes and angles of these components were used with the mean speed value as inputs of the ANN

In this paper, versatile Metal/TCO/p-Si Schottky Barrier Diodes (SBDs) with dissimilar TCO intermediate layers (ZnO and ITO) were fabricated by RF magnetron sputtering technique. An overall electrical performance comparison between the Al/ZnO/p-Si, Au/ITO/p-Si and the conventional Au/p-Si structures is carried out. The measured I-V characteristics indicate that the proposed Al/ZnO/p-Si design exhibits an outstanding capability for achieving a high rectifying ratio of 142 dB. This is mainly due to the enhanced Schottky barrier height (SBH) of 0.75 V and close to unite ideality factor (n = 1.23). Such behavior can be attributed to the enhanced interface quality achieved by introducing TCO inter-layers, which could decrease the Series resistance. A comparative study of the elaborated structures performance is carried out in which new Figures of Merit (FoM) parameters that combine both electrical and thermal stability performances are proposed. The Experimental results show that the proposed designs with ITO and ZnO sub-layers exhibits improved FoM parameters as compared to the conventional Au/p-Si structure. Moreover, this comparative study enables to the designer to acquire a comprehensive review about the Si-based SBDs design tradeoffs. It is demonstrated that the insertion of a TCO inter-layer might be beneficial for avoiding the degradation related-heating effects. Therefore, the proposed designs offer the possibility of bridging the gap between superior electrical performance and high thermal stability, which makes them suitable for developing high-performance Schottky solar cells and sensing applications.