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Hydrogen-bond-bridged intermediate for perovskite solar cells with enhanced efficiency and stability

Nature Photonics (2023)Cite this article

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Abstract

Improving the intrinsic film quality of metal halide perovskites is very critical to increase the power conversion efficiency and long-term stability of perovskite solar cells. Here we report a multifunctional, non-volatile additive that can be used to modulate the kinetics of perovskite film growth through a hydrogen-bond-bridged intermediate phase. The additive enables the formation of large perovskite grains and coherent grain growth from bottom to the surface of the film. The enhanced film morphology results in significantly reduced non-radiative recombinations, thus boosting the power conversion efficiency of inverted (p–i–n) solar cells to 24.8% (24.5% certified) with a low energy loss of 0.36 eV. The unencapsulated devices exhibit improved thermal stability with a T98 lifetime beyond 1,000 h under continuous heating at 65 ± 5 °C in a nitrogen-filled glovebox. This effective approach can also be applied to wide-bandgap perovskites and large-area devices to show reduced voltage loss and high efficiency.

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Fig. 1: Chemical interaction and morphology characterization of the perovskite films.
Fig. 2: Comparison of film growth kinetics by in situ PL.
Fig. 3: Structure analysis and DFT calculations of the intermediate-phase-induced crystallization.
Fig. 4: Characterization of photovoltaic performance and stability of PVSCs.

Data availability

All data supporting the findings of this study are available within this Article and its Supplementary Information. The .cif files corresponding to the single-crystal structures reported in this work are available from the Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre (2141303).

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Acknowledgements

The work has been supported by the Lee Shau-Kee Chair Professor (Materials Science) (A.K.-Y.J.); the support from the APRC Grant of the City University of Hong Kong (9380086, 9610508) (A.K.-Y.J.); the TCFS Grant (GHP/018/20SZ) (A.K.-Y.J.) and MRP Grant (MRP/040/21X) (A.K.-Y.J.) from the Innovation and Technology Commission of Hong Kong; the Green Tech Fund (202020164) (A.K.-Y.J.) from the Environment and Ecology Bureau of Hong Kong; the GRF grant (11307621, 11316422) (A.K.-Y.J.); from the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong, Guangdong Major Project of Basic and Applied Basic Research (2019B030302007) (A.K.-Y.J.); and the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Joint Laboratory of Optoelectronic and Magnetic Functional Materials (2019B121205002) (A.K.-Y.J.). We thank S. You for the technical support of single-crystal analysis and W. K. Wong for XPS measurements. A.K.-Y.J. thanks C. S. Lee for support with the UPS test.

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Author notes

  1. These authors contributed equally: Fengzhu Li, Xiang Deng.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Materials Science and Engineering, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China

    Fengzhu Li, Xiang Deng, Shengfan Wu, Zixin Zeng, Deng Wang, Sai‐Wing Tsang, Xian-Kai Chen & Alex K.-Y. Jen

  2. Department of Chemistry, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China

    Fengzhu Li, Xiang Deng, Zhangsheng Shi, Yang Li, Feng Qi, Francis R. Lin, Xian-Kai Chen & Alex K.-Y. Jen

  3. Hong Kong Institute for Clean Energy, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China

    Fengzhu Li, Xiang Deng, Shengfan Wu, Deng Wang, Feng Qi, Francis R. Lin & Alex K.-Y. Jen

  4. Department of Mechanical Engineering, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China

    Zhuomin Zhang & Zhengbao Yang

  5. Department of Materials Science & Engineering, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA

    Sei-Hum Jang & Alex K.-Y. Jen

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Contributions

F.L. and X.D. contributed equally to this work and were supervised by A.K.-Y.J. F.L. and X.D. conducted the film characterization, device fabrication and device characterization. F.L. synthesized the single crystal and analysed the results with S.-H.J. Z.S. performed the DFT calculations and was supervised by X.-K.C. S.W. contributed to fabricate the large-bandgap device. Z. Zeng helped collect the in situ PL data and was supervised by S.-W.T. D.W. performed the PL and time-resolved PL characterizations. Y.L. conducted the UPS measurement. F.Q. conducted the 1H nuclear magnetic resonance measurements. Z. Zhang performed the atomic force microscopy and KPFM characterizations and was supervised by Z.Y. F.R.L., X.-K.C. and A.K.-Y.J. revised the manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Alex K.-Y. Jen.

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Nature Photonics thanks Xiaojing Hao 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. 1–38 and Tables 1–5.

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Supplementary Data

The crystal structure of the GBAC–PbI2–DMF intermediate phase.

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Li, F., Deng, X., Shi, Z. et al. Hydrogen-bond-bridged intermediate for perovskite solar cells with enhanced efficiency and stability. Nat. Photon. (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41566-023-01180-6

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