Chlorobenzene vapor assistant annealing method for fabricating high quality perovskite films

In this study, chlorobenzene (CB) vapor assistant annealing (VAA) method is employed to make high quality perovskite films and produce high efficiency CH3NH3PbI3-xClx perovskite solar cells. The perovskite films made by this method present several advantages such as increased crystallinity, large grain size and reduced crystal boundaries compared with those prepared by thermal annealing (TA) method, which is beneficial to charge dissociation and transport in hybrid photovoltaic device. In addition, it is found that the CB VAA method could improve the surface property of perovskite film, resulting in a preferable coverage of PCBM layer and a better interfacial contact between perovskite film and upper PCBM film. Consequently, the short circuit current density (J(SC)) of the devices is significantly increased, yielding a high efficiency of 14.79% and an average efficiency of 13.40%, which is 13% higher than that of thermal annealed ones. This work not only put forward a simple and efficient approach to prepare highly efficient perovskite solar cells but also provide a new idea to improve the morphology and interfacial contact in one integration step. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.