Comparative Performance Analysis of Lead-Free Perovskites Solar Cells by Numerical Simulation

Abstract

Research of lead-free perovskite based solar cells has gained speedy and growing attention with urgent intent to eliminate toxic lead in perovskite materials. The main purpose of this work is to supplement the research progress with comparative­­ analysis of different lead-free perovskite based solar cells by numerical simulation method using solar cell capacitance simulator (SCAPS-1D) software. In this work, the device simulation is carried out in the n-i-p configuration of FTO/[6,6]-Phenyl-C61-butyric acidmethyl ester (PCBM) /Perovskite layer/ Poly[bis(4-phenyl)(2,4,6-trimethylphenyl)amine(PTAA)/Au using six different lead-free perovskite materials. The impact of different perovskite materials layers including hole and electron transport layer thickness, doping concentration on solar cell performances has thoroughly been investigated and optimized. CsSnI3 based perovskite solar cell shows the highest power conversion efficiency of 28.97 % among all the lead-free perovskite based devices. This clearly indicates that it’s possible to achieve high-performance lead-free perovskite solar cells experimentally at par with lead based perovskite solar cells in future research.

An extensive study on multiple ETL and HTL layers to design and simulation of high-performance lead-free CsSnCl3-based perovskite solar cells

“…The energy band gap defined by the difference between the conduction and valence bands is estimated to be ~ 1.0 eV using the GGA functional. The calculated band gap (E g ) value is well justified with other reports using GGA/LDA functional 42 , but this value is much lower than some reported band gap values using non-local functional 41,57 . This underestimation of the band gap, especially for semiconductor materials using local functions like GGA and LDA, are widespread 61,62 .…”

“…The favorable band alignment of TiO 2 (E g ~ 3.2 eV) ETL offers a higher current density while lower current in C 60 (E g ~ 2 eV) ETL owing to unsatisfactory band alignment. Thus, the ETLs band alignment influences the flow of photogenerated electrons or holes in CsSnCl 3 -based PSCs, which is consistent with previous reports 57,70 .…”

Effect of Methylammonium Iodide on the All-solution Prepared Methylammonium Bismuth Iodide Perovskite Solar Cells Performance

“…There are several types of Pb-free perovskite solar cells (Pb-free PeSC's) such as CsSnI3, FASnI3, MASnI3, MA3Bi2I9, Cs3Bi2I9 and many others. Among these, CsSnI3 has recorded the highest theoretical power conversion efficiency (PCE) so far, which is 28.97% as reported in last year (Srivast et al, 2021).…”