Efficient, flexible and mechanically robust perovskite solar cells on inverted nanocone plastic substrates

Abstract

Utilization of nanostructures on photovoltaic devices can significantly improve the device energy conversion efficiency by enhancing the device light harvesting capability as well as carrier collection efficiency. However, improvements in device mechanical robustness and reliability, particularly for flexible devices, have rarely been reported with in-depth understanding. In this work, we fabricated efficient, flexible and mechanically robust organometallic perovskite solar cells on plastic substrates with inverted nanocone (i-cone) structures. Compared with the reference cell that was fabricated on a flat substrate, it was shown that the device power conversion efficiency could be improved by 37%, and reached up to 11.29% on i-cone substrates. More interestingly, it was discovered that the performance of an i-cone device remained more than 90% of the initial value even after 200 mechanical bending cycles, which is remarkably better than for the flat reference device, which degraded down to only 60% in the same test. Our experiments, coupled with mechanical simulation, demonstrated that a nanostructured template can greatly help in relaxing stress and strain upon device bending, which suppresses crack nucleation in different layers of a perovskite solar cell. This essentially leads to much improved device reliability and robustness and will have significant impact on practical applications.

Bending Durable and Recyclable Mesostructured Perovskite Solar Cells Based on Superaligned ZnO Nanorod Electrode

“…Compared with the planar structure, it has been demonstrated that devices in meso‐structure show better controlling of the perovskite crystallization process and smaller hysteresis of the as‐prepared device . Interestingly, Tavakoli et al proved that the nanostructured substrate can assist in relaxing stress and strain upon bending, as they achieved mechanically robust PSCs on plastic substrates with an inverted nanocone structure . The efficiency of PSCs based on ZnO meso‐strcuture has been improving in the past few years.…”

Tunability of Band Gap and Photoluminescence in CH3NH3PbI3 Films by Anodized Aluminum Oxide Templates

“…To this day, most nanowires, nanotubes and nanoparticles have been produced successfully using AAO templates 15 . Furthermore, flexible and mechanically robust PSCs have been fabricated on plastic substrates with inverted nanocone AAO structures 16 .…”

Efficient Mixed‐Cation Mixed‐Halide Perovskite Solar Cells by All‐Vacuum Sequential Deposition Using Metal Oxide Electron Transport Layer

“…Apart from causing inconspicuous interference to QCMs’ readings and eventually film quality, especially when precursors of similar physical properties are being evaporated simultaneously, it significantly increases the fabrication complexity and production cost. To solve this problem, sequential vapor deposition comes in and is capable of acquiring high‐quality and uniform perovskite films for high‐performance devices . In reality, sequential deposition can be readily implemented in a large scale using an in‐line process flow.…”