Investigation of high performance TiO2 nanorod array perovskite solar cells

In this paper, systematic investigations on the fabrication and characterization of high performance TiO2 nanorod array perovskite solar cells (NAPSCs) are reported. The TiO2 nanorods, of length around 350–400 nm, were grown by solvothermal technique directly on glass/FTO substrates. From the scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM) we demonstrate that excellent crystallinity for the TiO2 nanorods can be produced using the solvothermal technique. Precursor consisting of a mixture of PbI2, CH3NH3I (MAI) and CH3NH3Cl (MACl) was used for the growth of perovskite thin films on the glass/FTO/TiO2 nanorod array (TiO2-NA) substrates. It is found that the morphology and quality of the perovskite layer depend strongly on the concentration of MACl in the precursor. Experimental studies on femtosecond transient absorption (fs-TA) indicate that the incorporation of TiO2-NA greatly enhances the collection efficiency of the photo-generated carriers due to substantial increase of interfacial area between the perovskite and TiO2-NA, leading to a reduction in carrier diffusion distance. It is shown to be the key factor that the proposed technique facilitates the use of a thicker perovskite absorber layer (∼500 nm) without compromising on the series resistance. Detailed J–V characterization shows that the NAPSCs exhibit negligible hysteresis with a power conversion efficiency (PCE) >19% for the champion device.