Device simulation of CH3NH3PbI3-xClx based mixed halide perovskite thin film solar cells

Abstract

Perovskite solar cells are an emerging area of study in photovoltaics research due to their low cost fabrication and high efficiency. In this paper, the numerical simulation of FTO/CdS/CH3NH3PbI3-xClx/CuI/Au device performance was investigated using solar cell capacitance simulator (SCAPS-1D). Here, mixed halide perovskite, Chloride (Cl) doped methyl ammonium lead iodide (CH3NH3PbI3-xClx), is used as perovskite light absorber layer due to good thermal stability, film quality and tunable bandgap property. In this present solar cell configuration CdS is used as buffer layer and CuI as hole transport layer (HTL). The effect of absorber layer thickness, operating temperature and different HTL’s were also analyzed on device performance. By varying the thickness of the absorber layer from 0.1 to 1.0 µm,the optimum thickness was found at 0.7 µm. In addition to this different HTL’s CuI, Spiro-OMeTAD and Cu2O were used in simulation and CuI gives best results compared to others. With optimized parameters, the proposed device achieves a PCE of 27.19%, FF of 87.88%, JSC of 23.86 mA/cm2 and VOC of 1.29 V. These optimized results will be used for the fabrication of an CH3NH3PbI3-xClx perovskite thin film solar cell.