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High-efficiency inverted semi-transparent planar perovskite solar cells in substrate configuration

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Abstract

The ability to grow perovskite solar cells in substrate configuration, where light enters the devices from the film side, allows the use of non-transparent flexible polymer and metal substrates. Furthermore, this configuration could facilitate processing directly on Cu(In,Ga)Se2 solar cells to realize ultrahigh-efficiency polycrystalline all-thin-film tandem devices. However, the inversion of conventional superstrate architecture imposes severe constraints on device processing and limits the electronic quality of the absorber and charge selective contacts. Here we report a device architecture that allows inverted semi-transparent planar perovskite solar cells with a high open-circuit voltage of 1.116 V and substantially improved efficiency of 16.1%. The substrate configuration perovskite devices show a temperature coefficient of −0.18% °C−1 and promising thermal and photo-stability. Importantly, the device exhibits a high average transmittance of 80.4% between 800 and 1,200 nm, which allows us to demonstrate polycrystalline all-thin-film tandem devices with efficiencies of 22.1% and 20.9% for Cu(In,Ga)Se2 and CuInSe2 bottom cells, respectively.

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Figure 1: Perovskite solar cell configurations.
Figure 2: Inverted semi-transparent planar perovskite solar cells in substrate configuration.
Figure 3: Photovoltaic performance characterizations.
Figure 4: Light-soaking effect.
Figure 5: Thermal and photo-stability.
Figure 6: Polycrystalline all-thin-film perovskite–CIGS four-terminal tandem solar cell.

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Change history

  • 14 July 2017

    In the PDF version of this article previously published, the year of publication provided in the footer of each page and in the 'How to cite' section was erroneously given as 2017, it should have been 2016. This error has now been corrected. The HTML version of the article was not affected.

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Acknowledgements

Financial funding from Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF)-NRP70, PV2050 (project NO.: 407040_153976 and 407040_153916), SNF-NanoTera and Swiss Federal Office of Energy (SYNERGY: 20NA21_150950), as well as Competence Center for Energy and Mobility are gratefully acknowledged. F.F. is grateful for financial support from the Chinese Scholarship Council (CSC).

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Authors

Contributions

F.F., S.B. and A.N.T. designed the research and experiments. F.F., T.F. and E.A. fabricated the perovskite solar cells and CIGS solar cells. F.F., T.F., T.P.W., S.P., E.A., C.A., S.B. and A.N.T. performed the characterization and analysis. F.F., S.B. and A.N.T. wrote the paper. All authors contributed to discussions.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Fan Fu or Stephan Buecheler.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Supplementary Information

Supplementary Figures 1–10 and Supplementary Table 1. (PDF 1383 kb)

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Fu, F., Feurer, T., Weiss, T. et al. High-efficiency inverted semi-transparent planar perovskite solar cells in substrate configuration. Nat Energy 2, 16190 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/nenergy.2016.190

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