Fabrication of Highly Efficient and Ambient Stable Planar MAPbI3 Perovskite Solar Cells via Defect Passivation through Crosslinking Strategy

Iodine-based hybrid planar perovskite solar cells' (PSCs) overall performance is still very limited. In this work, a highly functionalized iodine-based hybrid perovskite layer is fabricated by incorporating trimethylolpropane ethoxylated triacrylate (TET) within the perovskite precursor, which can crosslink with the grain boundaries to improve the crystallinity as well as the grain size and passivate the defect states of the perovskite material. The MAPbI(3)-based thin films with TET exhibited large grain sizes from 195.73 to 587.49 nm with 8 mg mL(-1) of TET concentration. The X-ray diffraction (XRD), Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), energy dispersive X-ray (EDX) elemental mapping, photoluminescence (PL), and time resolved photoluminescence (TRPL) characterization results suggest the strong crosslinking effect between TET and MAPbI(3), which improves the crystallinity and reduces the charge trap density. Planar PSCs is fabricated with the device architecture fluorine-doped tin oxide (FTO)/c-TiO2/MAPbI(3):TET/Spiro-MeOTAD/Au and achieved a power conversion efficiency (PCE) of 14.75% under 1.5 AM light illumination. The fabricated PSCs shows excellent ambient stability which retains 80% of their PCE after being exposed to the ambient environment of relative humidity (RH) approximate to 60%, room temperature (RT) approximate to 27 degrees C without any encapsulation.