Proceedings of International Conference on Hybrid and Organic Photovoltaics (HOPV24)
DOI: https://doi.org/10.29363/nanoge.hopv.2024.131
Publication date: 6th February 2024
With the explosive development of the Internet of Things (IoT) technology, indoor photovoltaics (IPVs) are becoming a promising candidate to sustainably power billions of wireless sensors for secured and smart buildings. Among the various photovoltaics technologies available today, halide perovskite-based IPVs are most promising for integration with IoT because of their excellent optoelectronic properties, easy and cost-effective processability using solution-based methods such as roll-to-roll printing, high specific power, and earth-abundance. The low intensity of the indoor light sources means the absence of beneficial light-induced trap filling of the perovskite photoactive layer. This demands stringent defect minimisation approaches at every functional layer to maximize the power conversion efficiency of IPVs and thereby reduce the efficiency gap (more than 20 % now) between the theoretically predicted and experimentally observed power conversion efficiency of IPVs [1].
In this talk I will discuss the effect of interfacial layer selection in maximizing efficiency and suppressing the hysteresis effects under indoor lighting [2]. Our study shows how the selection of hole extraction layers (HELs) (organic vs metal oxide) impacts the overall device performance of halide perovskite indoor photovoltaics. Two commonly used organic semiconductors (Poly-TPD and 2PACz) and metal oxide (NiO and CuOx) based hole extraction layers in the p-i-n device architecture were considered. Our results reveal that, though under 1 Sun illumination, the photovoltaic device performance is comparable, under low-intensity indoor illumination, the organic semiconductor HELs outperform consistently the metal oxides. In addition to the poor performance, the metal oxide HEL-based devices suffer severe light soaking effects and the bulk vs interface traps contribution to the detrimental light soaking effects were decoupled by studying the photovoltaic performance under different illumination (1 Sun vs 1000 lux) and the measurement sequence. Interface modification of metal oxide transport layers using 2PACz eliminated the light-soaking effects, passivated the defects, suppressed the leakage, and enhanced the indoor light harvesting efficiency. Thus, in addition to reporting the light-soaking effect of halide perovskites under ‘indoor’ lighting, our study put forward a useful design strategy to overcome the deleterious effect of metal oxide HELs.
LKJ acknowledges funding from UKRI-FLF through MR/T022094/1. TK acknowledges support by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, Materials Sciences and Engineering Division under Contract No. DE-AC02-05-CH11231 (D2S2 program KCD2S2). This research used resources of the Advanced Light Source, a U.S. DOE Office of Science User Facility under contract no. DE-AC02-05CH11231. Work was performed at beamline 12.3.2, beamline scientist Nobumichi Tamura. Part of the work was carried out as a user project at the Molecular Foundry, a user facility supported by the Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, of the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC02–05CH11231.