The role of GQDs additive in TiO2 nanorods as an electron transfer layer on performance improvement of the perovskite solar cells

Abstract

The electron transport layer (ETL) plays an important role in improving the performance of the perovskite solar cells (PSCs). The main focus is on different types of TiO2 structures as an efficient ETL. In the present work, TiO2 nanorods (NRs) are prepared by a simple one-step hydrothermal method and employ as an ETL in PSCs. The power conversion efficiency (PCE) of the TiO2 NRs based PSCs is improved about 217% compared with the mesoporous (mp) TiO2 based cells. In order to further enhance PCE of the PSCs, a new approach is adopted to synthesize the graphene quantum dots- TiO2 NRs (GQDs- TiO2 NRs) by hydrothermal method. The PCE of PSCs based on GQDs- TiO2 NRs show improvement of 1.34 times compared to the TiO2 NRs. The GQDs- TiO2 NRs is capable of being a promising alternative to be employed as an efficient electron transport materials for photovoltaic devices.