Parameters Influencing the Growth of ZnO Nanowires as Efficient Low Temperature Flexible Perovskite-Based Solar Cells

Alex Dymshits; Lior Iagher; Lioz Etgar

doi:10.3390/ma9010060

Parameters Influencing the Growth of ZnO Nanowires as Efficient Low Temperature Flexible Perovskite-Based Solar Cells

Materials (Basel). 2016 Jan 19;9(1):60. doi: 10.3390/ma9010060.

Authors

Alex Dymshits¹, Lior Iagher², Lioz Etgar³

Affiliations

¹ Institute of Chemistry Casali Center for Applied Chemistry, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem 91904, Israel. alexanderdym@gmail.com.
² Institute of Chemistry Casali Center for Applied Chemistry, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem 91904, Israel. lioriagher@gmail.com.
³ Institute of Chemistry Casali Center for Applied Chemistry, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem 91904, Israel. lioz.etgar@mail.huji.ac.il.

Abstract

Hybrid organic-inorganic perovskite has proved to be a superior material for photovoltaic solar cells. In this work we investigate the parameters influencing the growth of ZnO nanowires (NWs) for use as an efficient low temperature photoanode in perovskite-based solar cells. The structure of the solar cell is FTO (SnO₂:F)-glass (or PET-ITO (In₂O₃·(SnO₂) (ITO)) on, polyethylene terephthalate (PET)/ZnAc seed layer/ZnO NWs/CH₃NH₃PbI₃/Spiro-OMeTAD/Au. The influence of the growth rate and the diameter of the ZnO NWs on the photovoltaic performance were carefully studied. The ZnO NWs perovskite-based solar cell demonstrates impressive power conversion efficiency of 9.06% on a rigid substrate with current density over 21 mA/cm². In addition, we successfully fabricated flexible perovskite solar cells while maintaining all fabrication processes at low temperature, achieving power conversion efficiency of 6.4% with excellent stability for over 75 bending cycles.

Keywords: ZnO nanowires; flexible solar cells; growth rate; perovskite; precursor concentration.