Proceedings of 13th Conference on Hybrid and Organic Photovoltaics (HOPV21)
Publication date: 11th May 2021
Long-term stability of Perovskite Solar Cells (PSCs) is the main issue to be solved for a forthcoming commercialization of this technology. The stability of PSCs mainly suffers for water and oxygen infiltration as well as prolonged exposition to UV radiation. Hence, encapsulation of devices is mandatory to achieve good long-term stability [1,2]. Polyurethanes (PU) are cheap and environmental-friendly materials whose mechanical, chemical and physical properties could be easily tuned by thoughtful choice of their precursor.
In this work we proposed to use this class of materials as encapsulant for (flexible) perovskite solar cells [3]. We focused our attention on the barrier properties of PU, especially in the prevention of degradation caused by both moisture and oxygen. Furthermore, some UV-filtering molecules were added into the PU matrix to prevent their degradation during the illumination of the device [4].
To test their UV and thermal stability, polyurethanes were stressed by means of various approached: they were soaked with UV radiation for different times (i.e. 2, 4 and 8 hours under continuous irradiation) and thermally stressed (i.e. 100 °C up to one week and -50 °C for 30 minutes). Remarkably, both UV-vis and IR analyses of polymers did not show any significant modification as a consequence of the activity.
The polymers were then deposited on perovskite solar cells, the photoelectrochemical properties of encapsulated device remain constant up to three months. Notably, the incapsulated cells showed higher stability stored under ambient light with 50% RH and temperature ranging from 18 to 32 °C by retaining 94% of the initial power conversion efficiency after more than 2500 hours whereas unprotected device lost more than 90% of their performance during the same period.
This result is quite remarkable as it allowed to demonstrate for the first time the use of modified polyurethanes as promising encapsulant materials for PSCs.
This project has been funded from the Italian Space Agency (ASI) project, PEROSKY Perovskite and other printable materials for energy application in space (no. 2018-1-R.0). This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement no. 826013 (IMPRESSIVE).
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