The device instability has been an important issue for hybrid organic-inorganic halide perovskite solar cells (PSCs). This work intends to address this issue by exploiting inorganic perovskite (CsPbBr) as light absorber, accompanied by replacing organic hole transport materials (HTM) and the metal electrode with a carbon electrode. All the fabrication processes (including those for CsPbBr and the carbon electrode) in the PSCs are conducted in ambient atmosphere. Through a systematical optimization on the fabrication processes of CsPbBr film, carbon-based PSCs (C-PSCs) obtained the highest power conversion efficiency (PCE) of about 5.0%, a relatively high value for inorganic perovskite-based PSCs. More importantly, after storage for 250 h at 80 °C, only 11.7% loss in PCE is observed for CsPbBr C-PSCs, significantly lower than that for popular CHNHPbI C-PSCs (59.0%) and other reported PSCs, which indicated a promising thermal stability of CsPbBr C-PSCs.

Carbon-based hole transport material (HTM)-free perovskite solar cells (PSCs) have attracted intense attention due to their relatively high stability. However, their power conversion efficiency (PCE) is still low, especially for the simplest paintable carbon-based PSCs (C-PSCs), whose performance is greatly limited by poor contact at the perovskite/carbon interface. To enhance interface contact, it is important to fabricate an even-surface perovskite layer in a porous scaffold, which is not usually feasible due to roughness of the crystal precursor. Herein, colloidal engineering is applied to replace the traditional crystal precursor with a colloidal precursor, in which a small amount of dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO) is added into the conventional PbI dimethylformamide (DMF) solution. After deposition, PbI(DMSO) adduct colloids (which are approximately tens of nanometers in size) are stabilized and dispersed in DMF to form a colloidal film. Compared with PbI and PbI(DMSO) adduct crystal precursors deposited from pure DMF and DMSO solvents, respectively, the PbI(DMSO) adduct colloidal precursor is highly mobile and flexible, allowing an ultra-even surface to be obtained in a TiO porous scaffold. Furthermore, this ultra-even surface is well-maintained after chemical conversion to CHNHPbI in a CHNHI solution. As a result, the contact at the CHNHPbI/carbon interface is significantly enhanced, which largely boosts the fill factor and PCE of C-PSCs. Impressively, the achieved champion PCE of 14.58% is among the highest reported for C-PSCs.

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We demonstrate a method for fabricating a Cu 1.8 S/CuS nanoplate counter electrode (CE) via the alternating current (AC) etching of brass. The photoelectrochemical performance and electrocatalytic properties of Cu 1.8 S/CuS CE with a h value of 3.22% are much higher than those of Pt and conventional Cu 2 S CEs.Furthermore, it offers a simple and low cost method for producing CuS counter electrodes in the future.

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