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Inorganic wide-bandgap perovskite subcells with dipole bridge for all-perovskite tandems

Nature Energy (2023)Cite this article

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Abstract

Operating stability has become a priority issue for all-perovskite tandem solar cells. Inorganic CsPbI3−xBrx perovskites, which have good photostability against halide segregation, are promising alternatives for all-perovskite tandem solar cells. However, the interface between organic transport layers and inorganic perovskite suffers from a large energetic mismatch and inhibits charge extraction compared with hybrid analogues, resulting in low open-circuit voltages and fill factors. Here we show that inserting at this interface a passivating dipole layer having high molecular polarity—a molecule that interacts strongly with both inorganic perovskite and C60—reduces the energetic mismatch and accelerates the charge extraction. This strategy resulted in a power conversion efficiency (PCE) of 18.5% in wide-bandgap (WBG) devices. We report all-perovskite tandems using an inorganic WBG subcell, achieving a PCE of 25.6% (steady state 25.2%). Encapsulated tandems retain 96% of their initial performance after 1,000 h of simulated 1-sun operation at the maximum power point.

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Fig. 1: Density functional theory calculations of surface passivation and interfacial charge transport.
Fig. 2: PV performance of CsPbI3–xBrx perovskite solar cells with dipole layers.
Fig. 3: Characterization of CsPbI3−xBrx perovskite films.
Fig. 4: PL properties of perovskite films with different dipole layers.
Fig. 5: Performance of monolithic all-perovskite tandem solar cells.

Data availability

The datasets generated and analysed during the current study are included in the published article and its Supplementary Information and source data files. Source data are provided with this paper.

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Acknowledgements

This work was financially supported by the National Key R&D Program of China (2022YFB4200304), National Natural Science Foundation of China (U21A2076 and 61974063), Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province (BE2022021, BE2022026, BK20202008, BK20190315), the Technology Innovation Fund of Nanjing University, Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (0213/14380206; 0205/14380252), Frontiers Science Center for Critical Earth Material Cycling Fund (DLTD2109) and Program for Innovative Talents and Entrepreneur in Jiangsu. The work at University of Toronto was supported by the US Department of the Navy, Office of Naval Research (N00014-20-1-2572). J. Xu acknowledges SciNet, which is funded by the Canada Foundation for Innovation under the auspices of Compute Canada, for providing the computing resources for DFT simulations.

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  1. These authors contributed equally: Tiantian Li, Jian Xu.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. National Laboratory of Solid State Microstructures, College of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Frontiers Science Center for Critical Earth Material Cycling, Nanjing University, Nanjing, China

    Tiantian Li, Renxing Lin, Hongjiang Li, Zhou Liu, Chenyang Duan, Ke Xiao, Pu Wu, Haowen Luo, Ludong Li & Hairen Tan

  2. School of Materials Science and Engineering, Nankai University, Tianjin, China

    Tiantian Li, Qian Zhao & Xueping Gao

  3. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

    Jian Xu, Sam Teale, Bin Chen & Edward H. Sargent

  4. School of Physics and Electronic Science, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China

    Sheng Jiang, Shaobing Xiong & Qinye Bao

  5. School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Nanjing University, Nanjing, China

    Sushu Wan, Yuxi Tian & Jin Xie

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  1. Tiantian Li
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Contributions

H.T. conceived the idea and directed the overall project. T.L. and C.D. fabricated all the inorganic perovskite devices and conducted the characterization. J. Xu carried out the DFT simulation. S.T. performed SCAPS simulations. K.X. helped on ALD processing. R.L. and P.W. helped on the fabrication of NBG subcells. S.J., S.X. and Q.B. performed the UPS measurements. H. Li, Z.L., B.C., H. Luo, S.W., Y.T., L.L., X.G. and J. Xie helped on the material characterization. H.T. and E.H.S. supervised the work. H.T., T.L. and J. Xu wrote the draft paper, and S.T., H. Li, Q.Z., B.C., L.L., X.G. and E.H.S. improved the paper. All authors read and commented on the paper.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Edward H. Sargent or Hairen Tan.

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Competing interests

Hairen Tan is the founder, chief scientific officer and chairman of Renshine Solar Co., Ltd., a company that is commercializing perovskite PVs. The other authors declare no competing interests.

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Nature Energy thanks Junfeng Fang and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Figs. 1–22, Tables 1–8, Notes 1 and 2 and Refs. 1–25.

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Supplementary Data 1

Source data for Supplementary Fig. 4.

Supplementary Data 2

Source data for Supplementary Fig. 6.

Supplementary Data 3

Source data for Supplementary Fig. 9.

Supplementary Data 4

Source data for Supplementary Fig. 22.

Source data

Source Data Fig. 2

Source data for Fig. 2a,c.

Source Data Fig. 5

Source data for Fig. 5c,f.

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Li, T., Xu, J., Lin, R. et al. Inorganic wide-bandgap perovskite subcells with dipole bridge for all-perovskite tandems. Nat Energy (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41560-023-01250-7

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