Screen-Assisted Self-Spreading of TiO Precursor Solution on FTO Substrates for High-Quality Electron Transport Layers in Perovskite Solar Cells.

ACS Appl Mater Interfaces

CAS Key Laboratory of Materials for Energy Conversion, Shanghai Institute of Ceramics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 588 Heshuo Road, Shanghai 201899, China.

Published: August 2024

AI Article Synopsis

  • The electron transport layer (ETL) is essential for the efficiency and stability of perovskite solar cells (PSCs), and current methods for creating ETLs are often costly and complex.
  • A new screen-assisted self-spreading technique is introduced to create uniform thin layers of titanium oxide (TiO) on rough fluorine-doped tin oxide (FTO) substrates, improving coverage and reducing interfacial recombination.
  • This innovative method enhances the photovoltaic performance of PSCs, particularly increasing the fill factor compared to traditional spin coating, and is scalable, requiring less complicated equipment.

Article Abstract

The electron transport layer (ETL) plays a critical role in efficient and stable perovskite solar cells (PSCs). The current effective method for the large-scale preparation of metal oxide ETLs is mainly based on expensive sputtering processes. Here, a screen-assisted self-spreading method is proposed as a novel approach to prepare uniformly thin and conformal TiO films on a rough fluorine-doped tin oxide (FTO) substrate as an ETL in planar PSCs. The TiO ETL deposited by this method exhibited good coverage and homogeneity on the rough FTO substrate, thereby minimizing interfacial recombination. The photovoltaic performance of the PSCs fabricated by this method is superior to that of the cells fabricated by spin coating, especially in terms of the fill factor. The performance enhancement can be attributed to the complete coverage of the FTO substrate by the conformal TiO film, confirming the effectiveness and reliability of the proposed method for the preparation of the TiO ETL. The advantages of this method lie in its scalability to prepare oxide films with a large area, eliminating the requirement of complex equipment, such as spinners, sputters, or physical vapor deposition equipment.

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http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/acsami.4c10820DOI Listing

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