Improving the Photovoltaic Performance of Flexible Solar Cells with Semitransparent Inorganic Perovskite Active Layers by Interface Engineering

ACS Appl Mater Interfaces. 2021 May 5;13(17):20034-20042. doi: 10.1021/acsami.1c01674. Epub 2021 Apr 13.

Abstract

Inorganic perovskite CsPbBr3 has broad application prospects in photovoltaic windows, tandem cells, and other fields due to its intrinsic semitransparency, excellent photoelectric properties, and stability. In this work, a high-quality semitransparent CsPbBr3 film was prepared by a sequential vacuum evaporation deposition method without high-temperature annealing and successfully used as the active layer of flexible perovskite solar cells (F-PSCs) for the first time, achieving a power conversion efficiency (PCE) of 5.00%. By introducing an energy-level buffer layer of Cu2O between CsPbBr3 and Spiro-OMeTAD, the champion PCE has been further improved to 5.67% owing to the reduction of electron-hole recombination and enhanced charge extraction. The optimized devices present higher stability, which can maintain more than 95% of the initial efficiency even after continuous heating at 85 °C for 240 h. Moreover, the F-PSCs also exhibit excellent mechanical durability, and 90% of the original PCE can be retained after 1000 bending cycles at a curvature radius of 3 mm.

Keywords: CsPbBr3; flexible perovskite solar cells; interface modification; photovoltaic conversion efficiency; stability.