Project description
Promising perovskite solar cells get a boost in efficiency and longevity
Perovskites are the wonder children of solar cell materials. Within a little more than a decade, perovskite solar cell efficiencies have improved more than tenfold, breaking records and paving the way for the widespread uptake of cost-effective and highly efficient renewable solar energy to electricity conversion methods. Among the few remaining challenges are further optimising charge-carrier dynamics and increasing long-term stability, without which cost and performance targets cannot be met. The EU-funded HES-PSC-FCTL project is developing a novel concept to achieve these aims based on functionalised charge transport layers and graphene.
Objective
During the past years, photovoltaic technology has shown its greatest potential to be scaled up to meet future energy requirement. Perovskite solar cell (PSC) as a promising next-generation photovoltaic technology has attracted great attention, but its performance is still limited by charge carrier collection efficiency and long-time stability.
In this project, the applicant aims to employ novel all-inorganic charge transport layers to fabricate high efficiency and stable inverted planar perovskite solar cells (power conversion efficiency > 23%), based on a functionalized charge transport layer- a Lanthanum(La)-doped BaSnO3(LBSO)/graphene bi-layer. LBSO has a cubic perovskite structure which provides an opportunity to further improve the quality of the interface between the electron transport layer and the perovskite film in conjugation with atmosphere annealing process, which we term “LBSO-template induced perovskite re-nucleation and crystal growth”. A compact conductive graphene layer inserted between the LBSO layer and the metal contact can act as a spacer layer to block the mobile ion and moisture penetration. That will not only improve the device stability (maintain initial efficiency > 90% after 1000 h illumination), but also give a chance to reveal the device degradation mechanism in depth.deeply.
Fields of science
- engineering and technologyenvironmental engineeringenergy and fuelsrenewable energysolar energy
- engineering and technologymaterials engineeringcrystals
- engineering and technologynanotechnologynano-materialstwo-dimensional nanostructuresgraphene
- natural sciencescomputer and information sciencesinternettransport layer
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
MSCA-IF-EF-ST - Standard EFCoordinator
GU2 7XH Guildford
United Kingdom