Publication date: 1st July 2014
Recent advances in organometal halide perovskite solar cells have seen lab device power conversion efficiencies (PCEs) exceed 15%. Whilst high PCEs are essential in order to prove the commercial viability of these devices, their ease of processing must also be addressed. Currently, organometal halide perovskite cells may undergo an annealing treatment following the active layer deposition from solution. This process typically involves heating the device to 100°C for 45 minutes: A potential bottleneck in large-scale production.
In this work, we present a novel method for quickly annealing the active layer in organometal halide perovskite solar cells in as little as 2.5 seconds. Instead of conventional annealing in a hot air oven, near infrared (NIR) lamps are used to rapidly heat the cell substrate and drive perovskite crystallisation. This heating technique has already been demonstrated for use in dye-sensitised solar cells and other applications. Through the use of this method, we have produced a co-deposited perovskite-Al2O3 device with PCE in excess of 10.0% annealed in just 2.85 seconds; this is compared to an otherwise identical device yielding a PCE of 10.5% annealed in an oven at 100°C for 45 minutes. Optimal annealing parameters were obtained using UV-Visible-NIR spectrophotometry as well as through RGB image analysis of the perovskite film. The work also explores the effect of NIR annealing on perovskite crystal structure.