Improving the efficiency and stability of pervoskite solar cells
Perovskite solar cells (PSC) have attracted great interest and excitement as potential low-cost alternatives to silicon solar cells for power generation. PSCs satisfy the key pillars for new solar energy technology commercialisation of efficiency and low cost.
Unfortunately, PSC stability still remains well below that of commercial silicon solar cells. By including additives in the precursor solutions used to prepare PSCs, both efficiency and stability of the devices have been improved. Such an approach is also amenable to future scale-up.
Of all the different types of additives used for PSCs, II-conjugated aromatic additives (CAAs) have intrinsic properties that especially favour their inclusion, such as facile charge transport.
In this paper* published in Energy & Environmental Science, a team of researchers from Oxford Materials and the universities of Manchester, Bath, Lancaster, Teknologi Malaysia and The Royce Institute investigate how substituents of CAA affect PSC properties, including stability and efficiency. The authors show that substituents of CAA which improve additive hydrophobicity are desirable for enhanced PSC performance, and they discuss the relations that underpin this finding.
