Publication date: 17th February 2025
Hybrid organic-inorganic Perovskite Solar Cells (PSCs) have rapidly emerged as an attractive, affordable and easy-to-process alternative to traditional photovoltaic materials with record efficiencies over 26%. Especially, the possibility to manufacture flexible perovskite solar cells with high power per weight ratios has attracted considerable interest for space applications.
However, the space environment imposes harsh constraints, such as ultra-high vacuum, harsh thermal cycling and radiation bombardment. There are more and more studies observing radiation-hardness in perovskites. However, the behavior of PSCs in heavily irradiated environments is still only partially analyzed and requires more data. Especially detrimental proton irradiation induces damage with respect to increased fluence and energy. Even lower energies are suspected to lead to higher displacement damage due to a higher number of collisions within the perovskite.
Here, we conducted a proton irradiation experiment with three different, space-relevant energies, i.e. 50 keV, 1 MeV and 3 MeV, and a fixed fluence of 5·1012p+/cm2 comparing irradiated with non-irradiated cells.
A loss analysis was conducted to identify radiation-induced effects, which manifested as drops in efficiency and changes in material properties. Such changes have been investigated and described by means of optical and structural characterization. We were able to observe degradation mechanisms and correlate them with proton irradiation, as well as observing noticeably different behaviors for different energies.
In addition, by implying a thin layer of ALD-deposited Al2O3 over the completed solar cell, we drastically reduced radiation-induced damage from up to -30% relative PCE loss for unencapsulated cells to below -5% loss, effectively maintaining the cell performance after travel and irradiation.
In summary, we demonstrate an effective and facile way to prevent losses in PSCs exposed to proton energies similar to space conditions. This can propel the development of perovskite photovoltaics for space further in the coming years.
This work is supported by the Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt (DLR) within project PÆROSPACE (FKZ 50RN2201), the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft project number 516238647 - SFB1667/1 (ATLAS - Advancing Technologies for Low-Altitude Satellites) and the Friedrich and Elisabeth Boysen foundation. We also acknowledge the Centro Nacional de Aceleradores (CNA) where the radiation experiments were conducted.
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