Mitigating scalability issues of perovskite photovoltaic technology through a p-i-n meso-superstructured solar cell architecture

Abstract

The relevance of perovskite photovoltaics is fully supported by its impressive development in recent years. Besides high efficiency, adoption of this technology requires obtaining long operational stability and cost-effective fabrication methods of large area devices. With the current perovskite solar cell (PSC) configurations (planar or meso n-i-p), it is difficult to deposit uniform pin-hole free films over large area at low temperature (<100 °C). In order to solve the above issues, we adopt a fabrication strategy for the scaling up of perovskite solar cells. Particularly, we study and fabricate a meso-superstructured p-type/intrinsic/n-type (p-i-n) cell (p-i-n-meso) configuration in which the insulating mesoporous layer of Al2O3 plays a key role in the fabrication of perovskite solar modules and therefore we also draw attention to this structure that has been out of the map for the fabrication of large area perovskite devices. The potential of this architecture is demonstrated through fabrication of devices ranging from small area (9 mm2) up to eight-cell CH3NH3PbI3 perovskite modules over substrates as large as 100 cm2. A record photovoltaic conversion efficiency (PCE) of 9.3% and geometrical fill factor (GFF) of 84% was reached for a module with 17 cm2 of active area. Additionally, we carried out an in-situ monitoring of the photovoltaic parameters of one perovskite module for 2000 h under outdoor conditions, giving evidence of the high performance and stability of encapsulated perovskite photovoltaic technology in a real operational environment. This study paves the way to the upscaling of stable, efficient and full-solution-processed PSCs.