Surfactant-assisted doctor-blading-printed FAPbBr₃ films for efficient semitransparent perovskite solar cells

Abstract

Organic–inorganic hybrid perovskite solar cells have generated wide interest due to the rapid development of their photovoltaic conversion efficiencies. However, the majority of the reported devices have been fabricated via spin coating with a device area of <1 cm². In this study, we fabricated a wide-bandgap formamidinium lead bromide (FAPbBr₃) film using a cost-effective, high-yielding doctor-blade-coating process. The effects of different surfactants, such as l-α-phosphatidylcholine, polyoxyethylene sorbitan monooleate, sodium lauryl sulfonate, and hexadecyl trimethyl ammonium bromide, were studied during the printing process. Accompanying the optimization of the blading temperature, crystal sizes of over 10 mm and large-area perovskite films of 5 cm × 5 cm were obtained using this method. The printed FAPbBr₃ solar cells exhibited a short-circuit current density of 8.22 mA/cm², an open-circuit voltage of 1.175 V, and an efficiency of 7.29%. Subsequently, we replaced the gold with silver nanowires as the top electrode to prepare a semitransparent perovskite solar cell with an average transmittance (400–800 nm) of 25.42%, achieving a high-power efficiency of 5.11%. This study demonstrates efficient doctor-blading printing for preparing large-area FAPbBr₃ films that possess high potential for applications in building integrated photovoltaics.

Graphical abstract

Keywords

semitransparent / printing / perovskite solar cell (PSC) / doctor blading / wide bandgap

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Acknowledgements

This work was financially supported by the National Key Research and Development Plan (No. 2017YFE0131900), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 51672202 and 21875178). J.Z. thanks the support from the “Chutian Scholar Program” of Hubei Province, China.

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2020 Higher Education Press