New perovskite ink with wide processing window

The NREL scientists developing these perovskite ink with wide processing window believe it will lead to scalable high-efficiency solar cells

14 Apr 2017 | Editor

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DoE) National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) have developed a new perovskite ink with a long processing window that allows the scalable production of perovskite thin films for high-efficiency solar cells.

According to the announcement the while perovskite solar cells have proven to offer a route to high power conversion efficiency they are still to move beyond the confines of the laboratory. This - the scientist - is because the crystalline structure of perovskites must be carefully grown upon a substrate, which is normally done by laboratory-scale spin coating - a technology that can't be scaled to large-scale manufacturing. The best devices fabricated using scalable deposition methods, which are suitable for future module production, still lag behind state-of-the-art spin-coated devices developed in the laboratory.

The NREL scientists overcame this obstacle by developing perovskite ink with wide processing window that they believe will lead to scalable high-efficiency solar cells.

To create a perovskite film, a coating of chemicals is deposited on a substrate and heated to fully crystallise the material. The various steps involved often overlap with each other and complicate the process. One extremely critical stage requires the addition of an anti-solvent that extracts the precursor chemicals, and thus create crystals of good quality.

The window for this step opens and closes within seconds, which is detrimental for manufacturing due to the precision required to make this time window. The NREL researchers were able to keep that window open as long as 8 minutes.

The formula for the precursor perovskite ink included a chlorine-containing methylammonium lead iodide precursor along with solvent tuning, coupled with an anti-solvent, which could be deposited onto the substrate by either spin-coating or blade-coating methods. Both methods were tested and produced indistinguishable film morphology and device performance. Blade-coating is more attractive to manufacturers because it can easily be scaled up.

The researchers tested one precursor ink containing excess methylammonium iodide (MAI) and a second containing added methylammonium chloride (MACI). The MACI proved most effective in reducing the length of heat treatment the perovskites require, cutting the time to about a minute compared to 10 minutes for the MAI solution. The shorter time also should make the process more attractive to manufacturers.

Using blade-coated absorbers, NREL scientists made a four-cell perovskite module measuring about 12.6 cm². Of that, 11.1 cm² were active in converting sunlight to energy and did so with a stabilised efficiency of 13.3 percent.

This research is supported by the DOE's SunShot Initiative, a national effort to drive down the cost of solar electricity and support solar adoption.

Perovskite ink with wide processing window for scalable high-efficiency solar cells

Nature Energy 2 | Article number: 17038 (2017) | doi:10.1038/nenergy.2017.38

Received: 08 November 2016 | Accepted: 21 February 2017 | Published online: 20 March 2017

Abstract

Perovskite solar cells have made tremendous progress using laboratory-scale spin-coating methods in the past few years owing to advances in controls of perovskite film deposition. However, devices made via scalable methods are still lagging behind state-of-the-art spin-coated devices because of the complicated nature of perovskite crystallization from a precursor state. Here we demonstrate a chlorine-containing methylammonium lead iodide precursor formulation along with solvent tuning to enable a wide precursor-processing window (up to ∼8 min) and a rapid grain growth rate (as short as ∼1 min). Coupled with antisolvent extraction, this precursor ink delivers high-quality perovskite films with large-scale uniformity. The ink can be used by both spin-coating and blade-coating methods with indistinguishable film morphology and device performance. Using a blade-coated absorber, devices with 0.12-cm2 and 1.2-cm2 areas yield average efficiencies of 18.55% and 17.33%, respectively. We further demonstrate a 12.6-cm2 four-cell module (88% geometric fill factor) with 13.3% stabilized active-area efficiency output.

About National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL)

NREL is the U.S. Department of Energy's primary national laboratory for renewable energy and energy efficiency research and development. NREL is operated for the Energy Department by The Alliance for Sustainable Energy, LLC.

Source: National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL)