Publications

Journal articles

October 2019

Efficient and Stable Mesoscopic Perovskite Solar Cells Using PDTITT as a New Hole Transporting Layer

Mohammad Mahdi Tavakoli, Jiayuan Zhao, Riccardo Po, Gabriele Bianchi, Alessandra Cominetti, Chiara Carbonera, Jing Kong

Abstract

Stability is the main challenge in the field of organic–inorganic perovskite solar cells (PSCs). Finding low‐cost and stable hole transporting layer (HTL) is an effective strategy to address this issue. Here, a new donor polymer, poly(5,5‐didecyl‐5H‐1,8‐dithia‐as‐indacenone‐ alt ‐thieno[3,2‐ b ]thiophene) (PDTITT), is synthesized and employed as an HTL in PSCs, which has a suitable band alignment with respect to the double‐A cation perovskite film. Using PDTITT, the hole extraction in PSCs is greatly improved as compared to commonly used HTLs such as 2,2′,7,7′‐tetrakis[ N , N ‐di(4‐methoxyphenyl)amino]‐9,9′‐spirobifluorene (spiro‐OMeTAD), addressing the hysteresis issue. After careful optimization, an efficient PSC is achieved based on mesoscopic TiO 2 electron transporting layer with a maximum power conversion efficiency (PCE) of 18.42% based on PDTITT HTL, which is comparable with spiro‐OMeTAD‐based PSC (19.21%). Since spiro‐based PSCs suffer from stability issue, the operational stability in the PSC with PDTITT HTL is studied. It is found that the device with PDTITT retains 88% of its initial PCE value after 200 h under illumination, which is better than the spiro‐based PSC (54%).

Acknowledgements

This work was sponsored by Eni S.p.A under the MITEI Solar Frontier Center.

Research Areas
MITEI Author
Professor
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science