Recent advances in perovskite solar cells: morphology control and interfacial engineering

Abstract

Organic-inorganic hybrid perovskite solar cells are considered as a promising new generation photovoltaic technology that can be produced with very low cost. Recent studies revealed that organometal trihalide perovskite semiconductors exhibit several desired properties for photovoltaic applications including high absorption coefficient, low exciton binding energy, long carrier-diffusion lengths and facile tunable bandgaps, enabling their efficiencies leap from less than 5% to ca. 20% in small area devices in the past 5 years. Module efficiency up to 8.7% was also demonstrated, paving the way for potential commercialization of this new photovoltaic technology. In this review article, we discussed two important factors that had been employed to improve perovskite solar cell performance including morphology control of the perovskite films through advanced processing methods and also interface engineering in both conventional-type and inverted-type device structures. We also discussed the scientific and technological challenges remained to be solved before perovskite solar cells can be considered for real applications.