Chapter 5 - Nanocarbon: Low cost materials for perovskite solar cells

Abstract

This chapter provides the advantages of incorporation of carbon nanomaterials within the hybrid photovoltaic devices. Perovskite solar cells (PSCs) have gained great attention in the scientific community due to their high power conversion efficiency (PCE) achieved via low-cost and solution-processed fabrication techniques within a decade, which are extremely promising. Among various kinds of PSCs, carbon-based PSCs (C-PSCs) without hole transport materials -seem to be the most promising for addressing the stability issue because carbon materials are stable, inert to ion migration, and inherently water-resistant. Concurrent with the steady rise in PCE of C-PSCs, great progresses have also been attained on the device stability and scaling-up fabrication of C-PSCs, which have well signified the possible commercialization of PSCs in the near future. PCE of PSCs has been increasing showing that they have a promising future as a renewable energy resource to compete with conventional silicon solar cells. However, a crucial challenge of PSCs currently is that perovskite materials and PSCs have limitations of easy degradation and inferior long-term stabilities, thus hampering their future commercial applications. Low-cost and high-performance photovoltaic technique still suffers from the stability and hysteresis issues. Without doubt, carbon-based materials (e.g., fullerene and its derivatives, graphene-related materials, carbon nanotube, carbon paste) have been demonstrated to have positive effects on overcoming the above challenges, cooperated with the optimizations in perovskite absorber layer, interface, and device structure.