Tartaric acid additive to enhance perovskite multiple preferential orientations for high-performance solar cells

Additive tartaric acid (TA) in perovskite precursor solution promotes crystal growth with enhanced multiple preferential orientations leading to improved photovoltaic performance and stability. Perovskite film quality is a decisive factor governing the performance and long-term stability of perovskite solar cells (PSCs). To passivate defects for high-quality perovskite films, various additives have been explored in perovskite precursor with notable achievements in the development of high-performance PSCs. Herein, tartaric acid (TA) was applied as additive in perovskite precursor solution to modulate the crystal growth leading to high quality thin films with enhanced multiple preferential orientations favoring efficient charge transport along multiple directions. It is also noticed that TA can improve the energy level alignment in PSCs, which effectively accelerates both carrier extraction and transportation with non-radiative recombination suppressed at the perovskite interfaces. Based on the present perovskite films, the fabricated PSCs achieved an excellent champion power conversion efficiency (PCE) of 21.82% from that of 19.70% for the control device without TA additive. In addition, a PSC with TA additive was shown to exhibit impressive operational stability by retaining 92% of its initial PCE after ∼1200 h of aging at room temperature in ambient air with a relative humidity of about 10%–25%. In summary, the present work demonstrates a facile and versatile approach by using TA as additive in perovskite precursor to fabricate high quality perovskite films with enhanced multiple preferential orientations for high-efficiency stable PSCs.