A research team from Zhejiang University, Westlake University, Southern University of Science and Technology, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the University of California Los Angeles designed a high-entropy hybrid perovskite (HEHP) material. That discovery is to increase manifold, both efficiency and stability taken cumulatively for perovskite solar cells, and eventually is going to alter the face of solar energy forever.
High-Stable Devices: The Inverted Perovskite Solar Cell with the HEHP Material
For the first time, scientists constructed an inverted perovskite solar cell using this new HEHP material. Thus, the device showed improved open-circuit voltage and fill factor due to a reduction in non-radiative recombinations and an optimized interface. According to the research team, multicomponent single-phase perovskite structure resulted in exceptional phase stability at high temperatures for the new material, unlike conventional perovskites.
This was further supported by NMR spectroscopy, which checked its strength by detecting the coexistence of multiplicity in one organic cation for the HEHP material. Due to this multi-component structure, it ensures high thermal stability and rather surprisingly, high resistance to water and damp-heat conditions.
HEHP-Based Solar Cell Demonstrates Exceptional Durability and Efficiency
The researchers fabricated a perovskite film using the HEHP and used it to construct a conventional architecture solar cell: an ITO substrate, a SnO2 ETL, a perovskite absorber, a hole transport layer based on Spiro-OMeTAD, and finally, a metal contact of Ag. The HEHP-based device exhibited a PCE of 25.7% with an open-circuit voltage of 1.17 V, a short-circuit current density of 25.8 mA/cm² and a fill factor of 85.2% under standard illumination conditions; meanwhile, the reference devices without HEHP achieved an efficiency of 23.2%, with an open-circuit voltage of 1.13 V, a short-circuit current density of 25.1 mA/cm² and a fill factor of 81.7%.
Moreover, it was observed that the HEHP-based cell exhibited very high durability; the prime efficiency remained above 98% after 1,000 hours of operation. According to scholars, this performance was related to the ability of HEHP to reduce electronic disorders through synergistic interaction between multiple kinds of A-site cations with different types of defects.
High-Entropy Structures Boost Perovskite Solar Cell Stability, Efficiency
The paper’s corresponding author, Jingjing Xue, explained that high-entropy structures could improve perovskite solar cells’ efficiency and stability. She adds, “Due to this, the organic moieties of the HEHP are very highly disordered; therefore, the entropy gain from these moieties was correspondingly large, rendering it more thermally stable and structurally robust than an ordered single-component counterpart.”.
These authors show their confidence in the perovskite material’s being of utility not only for various perovskite compositions but also for different cell architectures. They believe that this approach can turn into a general, error-tolerant, and universal strategy toward enhancing perovskite solar cells’ performance while it uncovers the clue to future industrial mass production.
The work on this new cell concept is now published in the paper entitled “High-entropy hybrid perovskites with disordered organic moieties for perovskite solar cells,” Nature Photonics.
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- Researchers have designed efficient, stable perovskite solar cells using high-entropy hybrid perovskites.
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- High-entropy hybrid perovskite-based solar cells reached 25.7% efficiency.