Boosting efficiency and stability of perovskite solar cells with nickel phthalocyanine as a low-cost hole transporting layer material

doi:10.1016/j.jmst.2018.03.005

Abstract

Abstract:

The efficiency of perovskite solar cells (PSCs) has increased from around 4% to over 22% following a few years of intensive investigation. For most PSCs, organic materials such as 2,2′,7,7′-tetrakis(N,N-pdimethoxyphenylamino)-9,9′-spirobifluorene (spiro-OMeTAD) are used as the hole transporting materials (HTMs), which are thermally and chemically unstable and also expensive. Here, we explored nickel phthalocyanine (NiPc) as a stable and cost-effective HTM to replace the conventionally used spiro-OMeTAD. Because of its high carrier mobility and proper band alignments, we achieved a PCE of 12.1% on NiPc based planar device with short-circuit current density (J_sc) of 17.64 mA cm^-2, open circuit voltage (V_oc) of 0.94 V, and fill factor (FF) of 73%, outperforming the planar device based on copper phthalocyanine (CuPc) that is an outstanding representative of metal phthalocyanines (MPcs) reported. Moreover, the device with NiPc shows much improved stability compared to that based on the conventional spiro-OMeTAD as a result of NiPc’s high stability. Photoluminescence (PL) and Impedance spectroscopy analysis results show that thermally deposited NiPc has good hole-extraction ability. Our results suggest that NiPc is a promising HTM for the large area, low cost and stable PSCs.

Key words: Solar cells, Perovskite, Hole transfer material

Mustafa Haider, Chao Zhen, Tingting Wu, Gang Liu, Hui-Ming Cheng. Boosting efficiency and stability of perovskite solar cells with nickel phthalocyanine as a low-cost hole transporting layer material[J]. J. Mater. Sci. Technol., 2018, 34(9): 1474-1480.

Figures/Tables 6

Fig. 1. (a) Device architecture and (b) energy level diagram of the device: FTO/compact TiO2/CH3NH3PbI3/NiPc/Au.

Fig. 2. (a) XRD patterns of FTO/TiO2 (black line), FTO/TiO2/MAPbI3 (red line) and FTO/TiO2/MAPbI3/NiPc (blue line). (b, c) Top-view SEM images of FTO/TiO2/MAPbI3 and FTO/TiO2/MAPbI3/NiPc. (d) UV-vis absorption spectra of FTO/TiO2/NiPc (black dot), FTO/TiO2/MAPbI3 (red line) and FTO/TiO2/MAPbI3/NiPc (blue line).

Fig. 3. (a) Current density-voltage (J-V) curves of the PSCs with different thicknesses of NiPc. (b)J-V curves of devices with NiPc and CuPc as HTM. (c) Efficiency histogram of devices based on NiPc (and CuPc) as HTM for 30 cells. (d) Incident photo-to-current conversion efficiency (IPCE) spectra of the best-performing cell using the NiPc HTM. (The J-V curves were recorded under reverse scan with scan rate of 200 mV s-1).

Fig. 4. (a) Steady-state photoluminescence (PL) spectra of MAPbI3 on quartz (Quartz/MAPbI3) and MAPbI3 sandwiched between quartz and NiPc film (Quartz/MAPbI3/NiPc). (b) Time-resolved photoluminescence (TRPL) decay curves of Quartz/MAPbI3 and Quartz/MAPbI3/NiPc taken at the peak emission wavelength of 775 nm. Excitation is performed with a pulsed laser source at 471 nm with an excitation power density of 1 nJ cm-2 impinged on the quartz substrate side. Laser pulse length is 4 ns. Solid lines represent the fitting curve resulting from exponential fitting in the form of y = A1 exp(x/t1) + A2 exp(x/t2).

Fig. 5. Nyquist plot of the perovskite solar cells with NiPc as HTMs measured in dark at different applied bias ranged from 0 V to 0.8 V.

Fig. 6. Normalized efficiency decay curves of devices based on NiPc and commercial spiro-OMeTAD in air. The devices were not encapsulated.

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