High throughput fabrication of mesoporous carbon perovskite solar cells

The screen printed mesoporous carbon perovskite solar cell has great potential for commercialisation due to its scalable deposition processes and use of inexpensive materials. However, each layer requires long high temperature heating steps to achieve the necessary sintering and porosity, which is very time and energy intensive for large scale production. Near infrared processing is demonstrated here to reduce the heating time of mesoporous layers within a fully printed lead halide perovskite solar cell from 2 hours to 30 seconds. A stabilised efficiency of 11% was achieved by processing in 30 seconds, identical to that of devices heated in 2 hours. For the first time the effect of residual binder in the carbon electrode on the electron lifetime and charge transfer within devices has been investigated. Furthermore cross section EDX mapping of perovskite infiltration provides a greater understanding into the processing requirements of these devices vital to enable commercialisation

Homogeneous and highly controlled deposition of low viscosity inks and application on fully printable perovskite solar cells

The fully printed, hole-transporter-free carbon perovskite solar cell structure incorporating a triple mesoscopic layer has emerged as a possible frontrunner for early industrialisation. It is an attractive structure because it can be fabricated by the simple sequential screen printing and sintering of titania, zirconia, and carbon. The device is finalised by manual dropping of a perovskite precursor solution onto the carbon which subsequently infiltrates. This stage in device fabrication is inhomogeneous, ineffective for large areas, and prone to human error. Here we introduce an automated deposition and infiltration system using a robotic dispenser and mesh which delivers the perovskite precursor uniformly to the carbon surface over a large area. It has been successfully used to prepare perovskite solar cells with over 9% efficiency. Cells, prepared by this robotic mesh deposition, showed comparable performance to reference cells, made by standard drop deposition, confirming this approach to be effective and reliable. X-ray diffraction and Raman spectroscopy were used to confirm the uniformity of the deposition over a large area