Antisolvent Engineering to Enhance Photovoltaic Performance of Methylammonium Bismuth Iodide Solar Cells.

High absorption ability and direct bandgap makes lead-based perovskite to acquire high photovoltaic performance. However, lead content in perovskite becomes a double-blade for counterbalancing photovoltaic performance and sustainability. Herein, we develop a methylammonium bismuth iodide (MBI), a perovskite-derivative, to serve as a lead-free light absorber layer.

Element Code from Pseudopotential as Efficient Descriptors for a Machine Learning Model to Explore Potential Lead-Free Halide Perovskites.

The rapid development of machine learning has proven its potential in material science. To acquire an accurate and promising result, the choice of descriptor plays an essential role in dictating the model performance. In this work, we introduce a set of novel descriptors, Element Code, which is generated from pseudopotential.

Achieving High-Performance Perovskite Photovoltaic by Morphology Engineering of Low-Temperature Processed Zn-Doped TiO Electron Transport Layer.

Perovskite solar cells (PSCs) have become one of the most promising renewable energy converting devices. However, in order to reach a sufficiently high power conversion efficiency (PCE), the PSCs typically require a high-temperature sintering process to prepare mesostructured TiO as an efficient electron transport layer (ETL), which prohibits the PSCs from commercialization in the future. This work investigates a low-temperature synthesis of TiO nanocrystals and introduces a two-fluid spray coating process to produce a nanostructured ETL for the following deposition of perovskite layer.

Stabilization of hybrid perovskite CHNHPbI thin films by graphene passivation.

We report the long-term stability of water-sensitive hybrid perovskites CHNHPbI that were protected with monolayer graphene. This successful passivation was enabled by our development of a new water-free and polymer-free graphene transfer method. Monolayer graphene samples grown by plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition and transferred onto different substrates with the water/polymer-free method were found to preserve their high-quality characteristics after the transfer, as manifested by the studies of Raman, X-ray and ultraviolet photoemission spectroscopy (XPS and UPS), optical absorption, and sheet resistance.

Nanoparticle-tuned self-organization of a bulk heterojunction hybrid solar cell with enhanced performance.

We demonstrate here that the nanostructure of poly(3-hexylthiophene) and [6,6]-phenyl-C61-butyric acid methyl ester (P3HT/PCBM) bulk heterojunction (BHJ) can be tuned by inorganic nanoparticles (INPs) for enhanced solar cell performance. The self-organized nanostructural evolution of P3HT/PCBM/INPs thin films was investigated by using simultaneous grazing-incidence small-angle X-ray scattering (GISAXS) and grazing-incidence wide-angle X-ray scattering (GIWAXS) technique. Including INPs into P3HT/PCBM leads to (1) diffusion of PCBM molecules into aggregated PCBM clusters and (2) formation of interpenetrating networks that contain INPs which interact with amorphous P3HT polymer chains that are intercalated with PCBM molecules.