Performance analysis of MAPbI3 based perovskite solar cells employing diverse charge selective contacts: Simulation study

The rapid development in the field of organo-metal halide perovskite solar cells (PSCs) has led to the report of power conversion efficiency of >25%. However, their large-scale deployment and possible commercialization endeavor are currently limited due to the presence of high-temperature processed electron transport material (ETM) such as TiO2 and the expensive hole transport material (HTM) in the state-of-the-art devices. By employing Solar Cell Capacitance Simulator (SCAPS)-1D, we attempted to propose low cost charge selective materials as ETM and HTM, which can deliver high photovoltaic performance. For this, the evaluation of TiO2, ZnO and SnO2 as ETMs was validated. Besides this, the role of thickness of ETMs was also investigated in a PSCs using CH3NH3PbI3 as light harvester and Spiro-OMeTAD as HTM. Our simulation results suggests that 90 nm of SnO2 layer outperforms as ETM for device fabrication. Furthermore, in our pursuit to avoid the usage of Spiro-OMeTAD, different organic and inorganic HTMs (P3HT, CuSbS2, Cu2O, CuSCN) have been investigated, and specifically the HTM thickness was optimized for high performance. We have found that by using the configuration of FTO/SnO2 (90 nm)/MAPbI3/CuSCN (100 nm)/Au a PCE of 26.74% with a Voc of 1180 mV can be acheived. The role of metal cathode work function was also studied to replace the expensive gold (Au) electrode.