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Improved efficiency and stability of perovskite solar cells based on clays

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Abstract

Halide perovskites have attracted great attention from many researchers recently, particularly for their excellent optoelectronic properties in applications such as photovoltaic solar cells. In recent years, perovskite solar cells (PSCs) have made great progress with a power conversion efficiency exceeding of 26% comparable to single-crystal silicon solar cells, but the stability issue still limits commercialization. PSCs allow the absorption of large amounts of photons compared to Si solar cells and have a thin layer. This provides a great advantage in terms of cost. Another important advantage of perovskite is its long diffusion path and high carrier mobility. The degradation of PSCs is mainly due to oxygen, moisture, light and heat caused by external environmental factors. In this study, we use natural clays instead of synthetic porous materials. The clays were selected according to their chemical structure and solvent dispersibility. Montmorillonite, laponite, halloysite and Na-bentonite were used in this research. Significant improvements were observed using clays as scaffold. The improvement in efficiencies were observed around 5% with montmorillonite, 13% with halloysite and 7% with laponite in comparison with reference cell. These results show that those clays can be alternative natural, non-toxic and low-cost materials as scaffold layer in PSCs.

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The authors declare that the datasets and results obtained and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request. All data generated or analyzed during this study are included in this published article.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to TÜBİTAK (PN:121F183) for financial support of this work. Gamze Dölek would like to thank to TÜBİTAK (2211C programme) for scholarship support of her thesis and this work. We declare that the data used in this study are partially derived from Gamze Dölek's PhD thesis and Buse Nur Bütün's Master's thesis.

Funding

We acknowledge that this work was supported by The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Türkiye (TÜBİTAK Project number: 121F183).

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In this work, material preparation and experiments were performed by GD and BNB, data collection and analysis were performed by MK and EY. The first draft of the manuscript was written by EY and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Esma Yenel.

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The authors declared that they have no affiliations with or involvement in any organization or entity with any financial or non-financial interest, in the subject matter or materials discussed in this manuscript. The authors have no relevant financial or non-financial interests to disclose.

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The manuscript was only submitted to the journal named as ‘‘Journal of Materials Science: Materials in Electronics.’’ The authors have certified that this manuscript was not submitted to any journal for simultaneous consideration. The authors declare that the submitted results in the manuscript are original and any part of them had not been published elsewhere in any form or language (partially or in full), and this study was not split up into several parts for increasing publication number. The authors endorsed that all results introduced in this study were presented clearly, honestly, and without fabrication, falsification, or inappropriate data manipulation.

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Yenel, E., Dölek, G., Bütün, B.N. et al. Improved efficiency and stability of perovskite solar cells based on clays. J Mater Sci: Mater Electron 34, 2282 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10854-023-11728-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10854-023-11728-5

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