Proceedings of 13th Conference on Hybrid and Organic Photovoltaics (HOPV21)
Publication date: 11th May 2021
Perovskite-on-silicon tandem solar cells are a promising candidate to significantly increase the efficiency of PV modules. Despite the fast research progress on material and solar cells aspects, there is still a lack of processes for an industrial module integration of these devices. One aspect hereby is the adaption of encapsulation materials and processes to the requirements of perovskite materials. Process temperatures of about 150 °C are necessary to use well proven, in silicon PV commonly applied encapsulation materials with a high reliability. However, perovskites start to decompose into their components at high temperatures. This limits the temperature of the encapsulation process, which in turn constraints the choice of encapsulation materials. This work presents an encapsulation process for methylammonium lead iodide (MAPbI3) single junction perovskite solar cells (PSCs) with conventional production tools in glass-glass modules that serves as a model system for perovskite tandem applications. We evaluate the influence of the encapsulation process temperature between 120 °C and 160 °C on the performance of mini modules. From temperature dependent XRD measurements of our PSCs we expect the decomposition of MAPbI3 into MAI and PbI2 at process temperatures above 140 °C. Indeed, we observe a difference in the IV-characteristics between the PSCs encapsulated in the temperature range of 120 °C – 140 °C to those processed at 160 °C. At lower encapsulation temperatures the IV-curves taken 1 h after encapsulation show a pronounced S-shape and no degradation of VOC. In contrast, the PSCs encapsulated at 160 °C exhibit a VOC decrease of up to 29% compared to the initial measurement shortly after PSC fabrication and no significant S-shape. Both, the S-shape that occurs at low encapsulation temperatures and the VOC loss after encapsulation at 160 °C, are no longer significant after one week of module storage under dark conditions. The appearance and regeneration of the pronounced S-shape and the VOC decrease respectively are also observed when bare PSCs are tempered to the corresponding temperatures on a heating plate for 10 min. The presented encapsulation process therefore does not permanently damage the MAPbI3 PSCs even at a standard encapsulation temperature of 160 °C. This enables the use of well-established cheap encapsulation materials known from silicon PV and might simplify the industrial implementation of PSCs.
The Authors thank the German Federal Environmental Foundation (DBU), the state of Lower Saxony and the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy (BMWi) under grant number 03EE1017B (P3T) for their funding and M. Diederich, Y. Larionova, Tobias Neubert, David Sylla, M. Löhning, J. Strey and M. C. Turcu (all from ISFH) for PSC processing.