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Room-temperature sputtered-SnO2 modified anode toward efficient TiO2-based planar perovskite solar cells

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Abstract

It is of the utmost importance to promote the charge transport and retard the heterojunction barrier in the functional layers and at their adjacent interfaces to pursuit excellent photovoltaic characteristics of the perovskite solar cells (PSCs). Here, room-temperature sputtered-SnO2 films are introduced to modify FTO anode for improving carrier extraction and aligning energy band in the TiO2-based planar PSCs. For the SnO2-modified substrate with suitable sputtering duration, the following TiO2 film exhibits smoother surface roughness, less surface defects, and lower the trap-assisted interfacial recombination than that directly on the FTO, further facilitating the growth of perovskite grain size and promoting the extraction efficiency of charge carriers. On the basis of the optimized SnO2(6 nm)/TiO2 stack layer as electron transport layer (ETL), the PSC exhibits an outstanding power conversion efficiency of 21.45%, which is much better than that of the single TiO2-based device (19.68%). More importantly, the cell with the bilayer ETL shows a long-term stability against air, maintaining over 76% of its initial efficiency after 40 d. These achievements suggest that this study provides a feasible path to design energy level alignment and low temperature ETL for highly efficient and stable PSCs.

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Author notes

  1. The authors equally contributed to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Key Laboratory of Applied Surface and Colloid Chemistry, Ministry of Education, Shaanxi Key Laboratory for Advanced Energy Devices, Shaanxi Engineering Lab for Advanced Energy Technology, School of Materials Science and Engineering, Shaanxi Normal University, Xi’an, 710119, China

    Dan Li, Yong Li, ZhiKe Liu, DaPeng Wang & ShengZhong Frank Liu

Authors
  1. Dan Li
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  2. Yong Li
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  3. ZhiKe Liu
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  4. DaPeng Wang
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  5. ShengZhong Frank Liu
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Corresponding authors

Correspondence to DaPeng Wang or ShengZhong Frank Liu.

Additional information

This work was supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (Grant No. 2016YFA0202403), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 91733301), the Natural Science Foundation of Shaanxi Provincial Department of Education (Grant Nos. 2020NY-159 and 2020JM-297), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (Grant No. GK202103052), the Changjiang Scholar and the Innovative Research Team (Grant No. IRT_14R33), the 111 Project (Grant No. B21005), and the Chinese National 1000-talent-plan program (Grant No. 111001034).

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Li, D., Li, Y., Liu, Z. et al. Room-temperature sputtered-SnO2 modified anode toward efficient TiO2-based planar perovskite solar cells. Sci. China Technol. Sci. 64, 1995–2002 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11431-021-1861-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11431-021-1861-y

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