Enhancement of the thermal properties of heterojunction perovskite solar cells by nanostructured contacts design

Abstract

A perovskite solar cell design is structured and analyzed to investigate the thermal behavior of the cell. In order to perform large scale industrial devices, it is required to understand the effect of varying light intensity, ambient temperature and other sources such as joule heating and non-radiative recombination on the module. Subsequently, the enhancement of thermal stability is accomplished by selecting layers that can contribute to the reduction of operating temperature, such as transparent front electrodes and back electrodes. COMSOL Multiphysics is used to structure and simulate a regular planar heterojunction perovskite solar cell with ITO as a transparent front contact and Au as the back contact. These conventional contacts selection resulted in a maximum temperature of 79 °C for all sources of thermalization. Moreover, nine structures combinations are investigated by using FTO, AZO, Ag, and RGO electrodes. It is found that the best thermal structure is the one that utilizes AZO as a transparent contact and RGO as a back contact. This design achieves a huge reduction in the maximum temperature to ~32 °C; with a total of 59.5% thermal reduction when compared to conventional ITO/Au contacts structure.