Publication date: 1st July 2014
Perovksite-based solar cells have attracted significant recent interest, with power conversion efficiencies in excess of 15% already superceding a number of established thin-film solar cell technologies. Most work has focused on a methylammonium lead trihalide perovksites, with a bandgaps of ~1.55eV and greater. Here, we explore the effect of replacing the methylammonium cation in this perovskite, and show that with the slightly larger formamidinium cation, we can synthesise formamidinium lead trihalide perovskites with a bandgap tunable between 1.48 and 2.23 eV. We take the 1.48 eV-bandgap perovskite as most suited for single junction solar cells, and demonstrate long-range electron and hole diffusion lengths in this material, making it suitable for planar heterojunction solar cells. We fabricate such devices, and due to the reduced bandgap we achieve high short-circuit currents of >23mAcm-2, resulting in power conversion efficiencies of up to 14.2%, the highest efficiency yet for solution processed planar heterojunction perovskite solar cells. Formamidinium lead triiodide is hence promising as a new candidate for this class of solar cell.
Furthermore, we report on recent work involving replacement of the methylammonium cation with other small cations of varying sizes, and demonstrate impressive control over the bandgap whilst retaining the important 3D lead triiodide matrix. We show results from first-principles computational models that enable us to intelligently select the optimum cation for a particular bandgap of perovskite, including even narrower bandgap perovskites optimum for the process of solar energy conversion. We additionally demonstrate the good agreement of experimental and simulated results.
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