Effects of the location and size of plasmonic nanoparticles (Ag and Au) in improving the optical absorption and efficiency of perovskite solar cells

Abstract

Organometal halide perovskite has a vast variety of facilities and possibilities that makes them emerge in perovskite solar cell (PSC) technology. Interaction of incident light with plasmonic nanoparticles (NPs) leads to the formation of an electric field around the NPs. The electric field from plasmonic NPs can enhance the possibility of incident light absorption inside the active layer (AL). In this paper, the light scattering mechanism is used to investigate the effect of plasmonic NPs on the value of carrier generation rate and absorption in PSCs. The finite element method (FEM) under normal-angle sunlight (AM 1.5 G) was used to obtain open-circuit voltage (Voc) and short-circuit current density (Jsc) and as well as efficiency in the proposed structure PSC. The use of gold (Au) and silver (Ag) compositions in the structure of the plasmonic NP results in an increase of the AL absorption, over planar structures. In the simulation results, we showed that the performance of the device is highly dependent on the location of the plasmonic NP in different layers of the PSC as well as the radius of these NPs. Placing the NP in the hole transfer layer (HTL) with the radius of 30 nm and composition of Ag resulted Jsc of 20.31 mA/cm2, Voc of 0.94 V, and the power conversion efficiency (PCE) of 16.20%.