Progress of interface engineering in perovskite solar cells

Abstract

Organic-inorganic hybrid halide perovskite materials have been a suitable active layer in solar cells due to the extraordinary photonic and electronic properties. Perovskite solar cells (PSCs), no matter conventional structure or inverted structure, contain several key interfaces, including electrode/electron transport materials (ETM) interface, ETM/perovskite interface, perovskite/hole transport materials (HTM) interface, HTM/electrode interface. The interface is vital to the overall performance of the devices, since the exciton formation, dissociation, and recombination are directly related to the interface. Moreover, the degradation of devices is also highly sensitive to the interface. As a result, the deep understanding of the interfacial charge transfer and corresponding interfacial engineering is extremely important to achieve high-performance and high-stability PSCs. This review mainly focuses on the recent progress of interfacial engineering in PSCs, including conventional structured PSCs, PSCs employing carbon counter electrode, and inverted structured PSCs.

Directing nucleation and growth kinetics in solution-processed hybrid perovskite thin-films

“…Furthermore, hybrid organic-inorganic perovskites have also been promoted as promising materials for light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and memory applications [5][6][7]. There are noteworthy shortcomings associated with such hybrid organic-inorganic perovskite materials [8,9], but their optoelectronic performance alone is sufficient to suggest a bright future for perovskite-based applications.…”

Progress in organic-inorganic hybrid halide perovskite single crystal: growth techniques and applications

“…Benefiting from the unique organic-inorganic hybrid crystal structure and the diversity of the A-site, B-site and X ions, perovskite materials possess a lot of intriguing characteristics such as high light absorption coefficient [3], tunable direct bandgaps [4], low exciton binding energy [5], long charge carrier diffusion lengths [6,7], high ambipolar charge mobilities [8,9], and extended charge carrier lifetime [10]. Most of these characteristics meet the materials requirement of high-efficiency solar cells very well [11,12]. Thus, perovskite solar cells have made impressive progress in just a few years with maximum power conversion efficiencies (PCEs) evolving from 3.8% [13] in 2009 to a certified 22.1% [14] in 2016.…”

Rational design of SnO2-based electron transport layer in mesoscopic perovskite solar cells: more kinetically favorable than traditional double-layer architecture

“…PSCs exhibit high flexibility in cell architectures and the ones that contain mesoporous scaffolds are usually classified to be mesoscopic PSCs (M-PSCs) which are extraordinarily representative and reliable in terms of achieving high photoelectric conversion efficiencies (PCEs) [5,6]. In recent years, no efforts have been spared to promoting the device performance of M-PSCs and a stabilized PCE of 22.1% has been achieved recently [7]. Nowadays, with many scientific issues being explored around M-PSCs, the pursuit of further photovoltaic improvement is imperative.…”

“…Concerning materials, TiO 2 has been widely adopted in such duallayer structured ETL for M-PSCs so far [8,[12][13][14][15]. Actually, many attempts have been performed in order to make ETL kinetically more favorable, e.g., surface modifications, nanostructure tailoring, and the utilizations of alternative materials with better optoelectronic properties [16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23]. Compared with TiO 2 , SnO 2 is chemically stable as well and, more importantly, its charge mobility is almost two orders of magnitude higher than that of TiO 2 [11,24].…”