Inverse Opal Photonic Nanostructures for Enhanced Light Harvesting in CH₃NH₃PbI₃ Perovskite Solar Cells

Abstract

Light management strategies using photonic crystals have been proven to efficiently improve light harvesting and subsequently conversion efficiency of various optoelectronic devices. This study focuses on 3D inverse opal CH 3 NH 3 PbI 3 photoanodes in perovskite solar cells from a combined numerical and experimental approach. Varying the pore size and the layer thickness in numerical simulations, we first determined theoretical optimum from a purely optical point of view. Corresponding 3D inverse opal photonic nanostructures were then fabricated through spin-coating protocols using polystyrene nanospheres of various diameters as hard templating sacrificial agents. It demonstrates how the photonic nanostructuration of the perovskite layer impacts both optical and electronic properties of experimental samples. Regarding the individual 3D inverse opal perovskite layers, an optimum of light absorption is reached for an ∼500 nm diameter pore photonic nanostructure, with a photonic absorption enhancement as high as 16.1% compared to an unstructured compact benchmark. However, in addition to electronic-related countereffects, local light absorption in the hole transporting material is observed in assembled solar cells, weakening the light management benefits of the perovskite layer nanostructuration to only ∼3% photonic enhancement.

Perovskite photonic crystal photoelectric devices

“…Daem et al theoretically simulated the optimum pore size of a 3D inverse opal (3D-IO) photonic nanostructuration through a home-made genetic algorithm (GA) and a coupled-wave analysis (RCWA), and could experimentally demonstrated that the MAPbI 3 -PS500 3D-IO photonic nanostructuration with 500-nm-diameter spherical pores obtained optimal light absorption. 98…”

A fluorescence-enhanced inverse opal sensing film for multi-sources detection of formaldehyde

“…The refractive index of PC varies periodically, endowing them with special optical properties of photonic stopband, which indicates that the light at a certain wavelength cannot transmit the materials and will be reflected. The photonic stopband character renders PC to be used in various fields, such as catalyst [3,4], solar cells [5,6], anti-counterfeiting [7,8] and sensing [9][10][11][12][13]. Among these applications, the PC-based sensing for external stimuli such as temperature [14,15], humidity [16], strain [17], and chemical [18][19][20][21][22][23] and biological [10,13,[24][25][26][27] molecules have been paid more attention due to their regulable optical performance, for example using fluorescence enhancement effect [20,21], changeable photonic stopband position [22,23] or Debye diffraction effect [26,27].…”

Macroporous Mannitol Granules Produced by Spray Drying and Sacrificial Templating

“…Some porous particles also display improved compaction ability during tablet manufacturing [4]. Porous particles have been reported in the literature for both active pharmaceutical ingredients (API) [5][6][7] and excipients [2][3][4], in addition to many other fields in materials science, such as electrocatalysis [8][9][10][11], gas sensing [12] and other applications [9,[13][14][15].…”

“…This sacrifi-cial templating approach has been much studied for the preparation of metal oxides or silica with controlled porosity using a polymer template removed by heat treatment [22][23][24][25][26][27][28]. Polystyrene beads are one of the most common sacrificial templates because their diameter can be controlled during the synthesis allowing a broad range of pore sizes [13][14][15][27][28][29].…”