Investigation of photoinduced degradation of the perovskite absorber in various different solar cell configurations

Henry Snaith^a, Robin Nicholas^a, Konrad Wojciechowski^a, Jacob Wang^a, Giles Eperon^a, Severin Habisreutinger^a

^aUniversity of Oxford, Clarendon Laboratory, Parks rd, Oxford, 0, United Kingdom

International Conference on Hybrid and Organic Photovoltaics
Proceedings of International Conference on Hybrid and Organic Photovoltaics 2015 (HOPV15)

Roma, Italy, 2015 May 11th - 13th

Organizer: Filippo De Angelis

Poster, Severin Habisreutinger, 364
Publication date: 5th February 2015

The two crucial challenges in the development of a new photovoltaic technology are a high power-conversion efficiency, on one hand, and reliability, on the other hand. While impressive progress has been made with regards to ever increasing efficiencies, many questions regarding the reliability and stability of perovskite solar cells have so far remained unanswered. In this study, we investigate the performance reliability of perovskite solar cells under operational load conditions. Comparing various architectures, we find that the presence of TiO₂ leads to rapid catastrophic failure. We pinpoint UV light induced photooxidation processes that lead to degradation of the absorber material. In sensitized architectures, in which the perovskite is coated onto a mesoscopic TiO₂ scaffold, this photodegradation is observed to occur within few hours. The photocatalytic sites at which this degradation occurs are oxygen vacancies at the TiO₂ surface, which can partially be passivated in the presence of ambient oxygen. In devices, in which the hole transport layer is mostly impermeable to oxygen and this passivation cannot occur, the photodegration process proceed on even faster time scales. We show that by avoiding direct contact between the perovskite and photocatalytic material, such as TiO₂, by implementing organic electron acceptors, stable and reliable perovskite solar cells can be fabricated without sacrificing efficiency by filtering out the UV range of the solar spectrum.

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