Removing Leakage and Surface Recombination in Planar Perovskite Solar Cells

Thin-film solar cells suffer from various types of recombination, of which leakage current usually dominates at lower voltages. Herein, we demonstrate first a three-order reduction of the shunt loss mechanism in planar methylammonium lead iodide perovskite solar cells by replacing the commonly used hole transport layer poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene):poly(styrenesulfonate) (PEDOT:PSS) with a better hole-selective polyarylamine. As a result, these cells exhibit superior operation under reduced light conditions, which we demonstrate for the extreme case of moonlight irradiance, at which open-circuit voltages of 530 mV can still be obtained. By the shunt removal we also observe the VOC to drop to zero after as long as 2 h after the light has been switched off. Second, at higher illumination intensities the dominant losses in the PEDOT:PSS-based cell are ascribed to surface recombination and are also proven to be substantially minimized by instead employing the polyarylamine. We attribute the reduced shunt a...

[1]  Henk J. Bolink,et al.  Radiative efficiency of lead iodide based perovskite solar cells , 2014, Scientific Reports.

[2]  M. Alam,et al.  Universal statistics of parasitic shunt formation in solar cells, and its implications for cell to module efficiency gap , 2013 .

[3]  C. Deibel,et al.  Temperature Dependence of Ideality Factors in Organic Solar Cells and the Relation to Radiative Efficiency , 2016 .

[4]  Henk J. Bolink,et al.  Quantification of spatial inhomogeneity in perovskite solar cells by hyperspectral luminescence imaging , 2016 .

[5]  Nakita K. Noel,et al.  Anomalous Hysteresis in Perovskite Solar Cells. , 2014, The journal of physical chemistry letters.

[6]  D. Bradley,et al.  Copper thiocyanate: An attractive hole transport/extraction layer for use in organic photovoltaic cells , 2015 .

[7]  Yang Yang,et al.  Enhanced performance of white polymer light-emitting diodes using polymer blends as hole-transporting layers , 2006 .

[8]  Jinsong Huang,et al.  Advances in Perovskite Solar Cells , 2016, Advanced science.

[9]  Yanjun Fang,et al.  Resolving Weak Light of Sub‐picowatt per Square Centimeter by Hybrid Perovskite Photodetectors Enabled by Noise Reduction , 2015, Advanced materials.

[10]  H. Kuo,et al.  A look into the origin of shunt leakage current of Cu(In,Ga)Se2 solar cells via experimental and simulation methods , 2013 .

[11]  I. Mathews,et al.  Performance of III–V Solar Cells as Indoor Light Energy Harvesters , 2016, IEEE Journal of Photovoltaics.

[12]  Christoph J. Brabec,et al.  Organic photovoltaics for low light applications , 2011 .

[13]  Emilio Palomares,et al.  Optoelectronic Studies of Methylammonium Lead Iodide Perovskite Solar Cells with Mesoporous TiO₂: Separation of Electronic and Chemical Charge Storage, Understanding Two Recombination Lifetimes, and the Evolution of Band Offsets during J-V Hysteresis. , 2015, Journal of the American Chemical Society.

[14]  Edward H. Hellen,et al.  Verifying the diode-capacitor circuit voltage decay , 2003 .

[15]  J. Barbé,et al.  Improved Efficiency in Inverted Perovskite Solar Cells Employing a Novel Diarylamino‐Substituted Molecule as PEDOT:PSS Replacement , 2016 .

[16]  C. Brabec,et al.  Overcoming the Interface Losses in Planar Heterojunction Perovskite‐Based Solar Cells , 2016, Advanced materials.

[17]  Andrew Blakers,et al.  Accurate series resistance measurement of solar cells , 2013 .

[18]  Magnus Berggren,et al.  Semi-metallic polymers. , 2014, Nature materials.

[19]  N. Armstrong,et al.  Selective Interlayers and Contacts in Organic Photovoltaic Cells. , 2011, The journal of physical chemistry letters.

[20]  Y. N. Mohapatra,et al.  Open circuit voltage decay transients and recombination in bulk-heterojunction solar cells , 2014 .

[21]  Hooman Mohseni,et al.  Universality of non-ohmic shunt leakage in thin-film solar cells , 2010 .

[22]  Young Chan Kim,et al.  Compositional engineering of perovskite materials for high-performance solar cells , 2015, Nature.

[23]  J. Teuscher,et al.  Efficient Hybrid Solar Cells Based on Meso-Superstructured Organometal Halide Perovskites , 2012, Science.

[24]  M. Grätzel.  The light and shade of perovskite solar cells. , 2014, Nature materials.

[25]  Michael C. Heiber,et al.  Persistent photovoltage in methylammonium lead iodide perovskite solar cells , 2014, 1406.4276.

[26]  Jinsong Huang,et al.  High‐Gain and Low‐Driving‐Voltage Photodetectors Based on Organolead Triiodide Perovskites , 2015, Advanced materials.

[27]  Edward H. Sargent,et al.  Planar-integrated single-crystalline perovskite photodetectors , 2015, Nature Communications.

[28]  F. So,et al.  High‐Efficiency Solution‐Processed Planar Perovskite Solar Cells with a Polymer Hole Transport Layer , 2015 .

[29]  Qingfeng Dong,et al.  Highly narrowband perovskite single-crystal photodetectors enabled by surface-charge recombination , 2015, Nature Photonics.

[30]  K. Tamaki,et al.  Dye-sensitised and Perovskite Solar Cells as Indoor Energy Harvestors , 2015 .

[31]  Henk J. Bolink,et al.  Perovskite solar cells employing organic charge-transport layers , 2013, Nature Photonics.