Numerical analysis of stable and low cost perovskite solar cell with an enhanced inorganic electron and hole transport layers

The perovskite-based solar cells (PSCs) are gaining much attention for application in solar cell device frameworks due to high absorption property, easy and low-cost fabrication, and tunable bandgap. The PSCs exhibiting conversion efficiency up to ~22% are reported utilizing expensive and unstable electrons and hole transportation layers (ETL and HTL). However the stability of these devices drastically suffers under humid conditions and in an environment that is rich with ultraviolet radiation. The deterioration under such conditions produces Pb ions which are harmful to the biotic environment limiting its usefulness for practical device implantation. In this work, we propose the designing of methyl ammonium lead halide (CH3NH3PBI3) based planar perovskite solar cell. The general-purpose solar cell simulation tool (GPVDM) is used to simulate and study the proposed design in detail. The format of the cell consists of indium tin oxide (ITO)/ zinc oxide (ZnO) /CH3NH3PBI3/ Cu doped (2%) nickel oxide (Cu: NiOx)/ Aluminum (AL). The HTL layer utilized in our study demonstrated a high stability (48%) in ultraviolet radiation. We also investigated the effect of active layer thickness, ETL and HTL layer, parasitic resistance, light intensity and operating temperature on proposed PSCs. The optimum layer thickness of active, ETL and HTL was found to be 400nm and 150nm respectively, while keeping the electrode thickness to 100nm. At the optimum thickness, the device demonstrates fill factor (FF) and efficiency as 15.33% and 0.8516, respectively. The optimum device operating temperature was 285k. The observed maximum FF and maximum efficiency reached up to 15.85% and 0.8574 respectively with thicker active, ETL/HTL layers. We observed that our HTL layer (Cu doped nickel oxide) shows stability of 66% against ultraviolet A and 48% against both ultraviolet A and B. This study provides a comprehensive numerical analysis for designing an efficient perovskite based solar cell which can be adopted for practical device fabrication.