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Melt- and air-processed selenium thin-film solar cells

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Abstract

Elemental selenium (Se), as the world’s first but long-neglected photovoltaic material, has regained great interest recently in tandem solar cells as top cells due to its wide bandgap (∼1.8 eV), simple, non-toxic and earth-abundant composition, and intrinsic environmental stability. In particular, Se possesses the lowest melting point of 217 °C among the photovoltaic absorbers reported so far, endowing Se with a unique advantage of film fabrication by blade coating the Se melt on substrate. However, the poor wettability of Se melt on widely-used photovoltaic functional layers such as TiO2 limits its melt processing. Here we introduce a wettability-modification strategy that decreases the contact angle of Se melt on substrate and improves the wettability by appropriately enhancing the heating temperature of molten Se while avoiding Se volatilization. We further reveal the mechanism of the inherent air stability of Se that originates from the high activation energy of oxygen chemisorption on Se (3.21 eV). This enables the realization of compact Se films through melt-based blade coating in ambient air. The resulting Se solar cells exhibit an efficiency of 3.5%. Unencapsulated devices show no efficiency loss after 1,000 h of storage under ambient conditions.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation of China (21922512, 21875264), Chinese Postdoctoral Science Foundation (2021MD703865), and the Youth Innovation Promotion CAS (Y2021014).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Beijing National Laboratory for Molecular Sciences (BNLMS), CAS Key Laboratory of Molecular Nanostructure and Nanotechnology, Institute of Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100190, China

    Wenbo Lu, Mingjie Feng, Hui-Juan Yan, Bin Yan, Liyan Hu, Xing Zhang, Shunchang Liu, Jin-Song Hu & Ding-Jiang Xue

  2. School of Material and Chemical Engineering, Tongren University, Tongren, 554300, China

    Zongbao Li

  3. National Engineering Research Center for Advanced Polymer Processing Technology, Zhengzhou University, Zhengzhou, 450002, China

    Mingjie Feng

  4. University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100049, China

    Wenbo Lu, Hui-Juan Yan, Xing Zhang, Jin-Song Hu & Ding-Jiang Xue

Authors
  1. Wenbo Lu
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  2. Zongbao Li
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  3. Mingjie Feng
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  4. Hui-Juan Yan
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  5. Bin Yan
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  8. Shunchang Liu
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  9. Jin-Song Hu
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  10. Ding-Jiang Xue
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Correspondence to Ding-Jiang Xue.

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Supporting information The supporting information is available online at https://chem.scichina.com and https://link.springer.com/journal/11426. The supporting materials are published as submitted, without typesetting or editing. The responsibility for scientific accuracy and content remains entirely with the authors.

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Lu, W., Li, Z., Feng, M. et al. Melt- and air-processed selenium thin-film solar cells. Sci. China Chem. 65, 2197–2204 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11426-022-1332-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11426-022-1332-3

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