Proceedings of Perovskite Thin Film Photovoltaics (ABXPV16)
Publication date: 14th December 2015
We investigated origin of hysteresis in I-V curves of a planar perovskite cell using different equivalent circuit models and simulation of their I-V curves. A planar cells showing huge hysteresis, PCE of 18.0% on reverse and 8.8% on forward scan was used for validating the equivalent circuits. We found that the standard equivalent circuit with a diode, a series resistance and a shunt resistance does not reproduce the hysteresis I-V curves. Even, incorporation of a capacitive component in the circuit also did not match the experimental hysteretic I-V curves. However, an equivalent circuit composed of two series connected diodes, two capacitors, two shunt resistances and a series resistance reproduced the hysteretic I-V curves, the simulated curves matched closely with the experimental I-V curves. This suggests that perovskite cell has two active interfaces; TiO2/ CH3NH3PbI3 and CH3NH3PbI3/spiro-OMeTAD. Hysteresis is essentially caused by carrier accumulation at these active interfaces . We believe that the defects (voids) present at the interface TiO2/CH3NH3PbI3 create high electrical capacitance and the other interface with less defects exhibit small capacitance, creating hysteresis, which shows good agreement with the simulated results.