Bio-inspired Carbon Hole Transporting Layer Derived from Aloe Vera Plant for Cost-Effective Fully Printable Mesoscopic Carbon Perovskite Solar Cells

Sawanta S Mali; Hyungjin Kim; Jyoti V Patil; Chang Kook Hong

doi:10.1021/acsami.8b08383

Bio-inspired Carbon Hole Transporting Layer Derived from Aloe Vera Plant for Cost-Effective Fully Printable Mesoscopic Carbon Perovskite Solar Cells

ACS Appl Mater Interfaces. 2018 Sep 19;10(37):31280-31290. doi: 10.1021/acsami.8b08383. Epub 2018 Sep 7.

Authors

Sawanta S Mali¹, Hyungjin Kim¹, Jyoti V Patil¹, Chang Kook Hong¹

Affiliation

¹ Polymer Energy Materials Laboratory, School of Advanced Chemical Engineering , Chonnam National University , Gwangju 500757 , South Korea.

PMID: 30130386
DOI: 10.1021/acsami.8b08383

Abstract

Herein, we introduce a new ecofriendly naturally extracted cross-linked carbon nanoparticles as a hole transporting layer (C-HTL) prepared by an ancient Indian method for carbon based printable mesoscopic perovskite solar cells (C-PSCs), which is low-cost so far used for fully printable PSCs. The fabricated PSCs having Glass/FTO/mp-TiO₂/ZrO₂/perovskite/AV-C configuration exhibited current density ( J_SC) of 20.50 ± 0.5 mAcm^-2, open circuit voltage ( V_OC) of 0.965 ± 0.02 V and fill factor (FF) of 58 ± 2%, resulting in 12.3 ± 0.2% power conversion efficiency (PCE) for MAPbI₃ perovskite absorber. The aloe-vera processed carbon C-HTL based PSCs yields up to 12.50% power conversion efficiency and 15.80% efficiency for conventional spiro-MeOTAD based HTM. The air and moisture stability >1000 h at >45% relative humidity (RH) for cross-linked AV-C nanoparticle-based PSCs. This stability is very high compared to conventional spiro-MeOTAD HTM-based PSCs. The prepared carbon nanoparticles facilitate an excellent penetration of perovskite absorber in triple-layer-based scaffold, which enables a high-quality perovskite crystal and results in high PCE. This novel bio-inspired AV-C cross-linked nanoparticle-based natural carbon C-HTL is low-cost until date. We believe this technique would be suitable for and helpful toward fully printable and air-moisture-stable PSCs.

Keywords: air-stable; bio-inspired cross-linked carbon nanoparticles; fully printable perovskite solar cells; humidity-stable; low-cost hole extraction layer.