Simulation studies on the electron transport layer based perovskite solar cell to achieve high photovoltaic efficiency

Abstract

Perovskite solar cells have attracted the attention of the researchers in the last couple of years as a potential photovoltaic device. However, the use of expensive hole transport materials (HTM) in these devices often restricts their commercial adaptability. Thus exploring cost-effective, efficient HTL and ETL materials remain an important challenge to the researchers. In this work, simulation studies are carried out considering cupric oxide (CuO), a relatively inexpensive material as hole transport materials for planar heterojunction perovskite solar cells. The photo-voltaic performance of CuO based hole transport layer (HTL) has been estimated in combination with several electron transport materials (ETM) that include TiO2,SnO2,ZnO, CdS, ZnSe,PCBM and Cd1-xZnxS.Studies predict that among these materials, the Cd1-xZnxS electron transport layer (ETL) could be the most promising to result high photo-voltaic efficiency in combination to CuO based HTL. Also, the thickness and optical band gap of perovskite absorber are optimized in order to achieve maximum photo-voltaic efficiency. The cell efficiency of FTO / Cd1-xZnxS /CH3NH3PbI3/CuO/carbon structure is predicted 25.24% under optimized operational conditions with Voc, Jsc and Fill Factor of 1.1eV,26.32mA/cm2 and 87.14% respectively.