Dialkylamines Driven Two-Step Recovery of NiOx/ITO Substrates for High-Reproducibility Recycling of Perovskite Solar Cells

Xiyuan Feng; Shuangpeng Wang; Qing Guo; Yudong Zhu; Jingwei Xiu; Limin Huang; Zikang Tang; Zhubing He

doi:10.1021/acs.jpclett.1c00735

Dialkylamines Driven Two-Step Recovery of NiO_x/ITO Substrates for High-Reproducibility Recycling of Perovskite Solar Cells

J Phys Chem Lett. 2021 May 20;12(19):4735-4741. doi: 10.1021/acs.jpclett.1c00735. Epub 2021 May 13.

Authors

Xiyuan Feng^{1

2}, Shuangpeng Wang^{2

3}, Qing Guo⁴, Yudong Zhu¹, Jingwei Xiu¹, Limin Huang⁴, Zikang Tang^{2

3}, Zhubing He¹

Affiliations

¹ Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Shenzhen Key Laboratory of Full Spectral Solar Electricity Generation (FSSEG), Southern University of Science and Technology, No. 1088, Xueyuan Road, Shenzhen, 518055, China.
² Joint Key Laboratory of the Ministry of Education, Institute of Applied Physics and Materials Engineering, University of Macau, Avenida da Universidade, Taipa, Macau, 999078, China.
³ Department of Physics and Chemistry, Faculty of Science and Technology, University of Macau, Avenida da Universidade, Taipa, Macau, 999078, China.
⁴ Department of Chemistry, Southern University of Science and Technology, No. 1088, Xueyuan Road, Shenzhen, 518055, China.

PMID: 33983026
DOI: 10.1021/acs.jpclett.1c00735

Abstract

Because of the toxicity of water-soluble lead, the recycling of organic-inorganic lead-halides perovskite solar cells (PSCs) has attracted increasing attention. Here, we report a highly reliable two-step process to recycle cost-dominated indium-tin-oxide (ITO) substrates coated with NiO_x and regenerate their based PSCs by function of dialkylamines. The champion recycled PSC can achieve 20% in conversion-efficiency, higher than 17.92% of the fresh one. Strikingly, the regenerated devices can remain superior to the fresh ones in the first 7 of 10 recycles. The comprehensive X-ray photoelectronic spectroscopy analysis reveals that dipropylamine has a suitable interaction with NiO_x surfaces by Ni-N coordination, enabling its effective interfacial passivation and template effect of high-quality growth of perovskites. That leads to the suppressed nonradiative recombination of both interfacial and bulk, and finally improves the device performances. The dialkylamines driven two-step recycling process offers a promising and highly reproducible strategy to recycle PSCs, especially the cost-dominated NiO_x/ITO substrates.