The project aims to solve one of the current major challenges: a global transition to a low-carbon society and a green economy by 2050. Solar energy is the largest reliable, sustainable, and long-term supply of carbon-free energy source and is capable enough to fully cover the global electricity demand providing environmentally friendly and grid-free electricity. For any solar cell technology to be successful, three milestones have to be realized: low-cost, high efficiency, and long-term stability. The potential advantages of emerging perovskite solar cell (PSC) technology are abundant and cheap materials, which can be solution-processable reducing the fabrication costs of large-area printed applications. The era of PSCs has started in 2009 with 3.8% power conversion efficiency (PCE) and it has rapidly become the hottest topic in photovoltaics due to their unique optical and electrical properties. The fast development of device engineering and perovskite composition allowed to improve up-to-date solar cells with commercially attractive and certified PCE over 25%. However, although PSCs have skyrocketed in PCE, much-needed long-term device stability is not matched due to the decomposition when exposed to the ambient environment. Therefore, this project focuses on the design and molecular engineering of innovative interfaces to stabilize the PSCs. During this project, novel organic hole transporting materials (HTMs) with reactive groups will be designed and synthesized in order to obtain interfacially stitched perovskite/HTM compositions with improved device stability. This will prevent direct contact of adventitious water, reduce the density of the grain boundaries, improve charge transport and device stability being a key-step for the commercialization of PSC technology.
Project funding:
This research project is funded by the European Social Fund according to the 2014–2020 Operational Programme for the European Union Funds’ Investments, under measure’s No. 09.3.3-LMT-K-712 activity “Promotion of postdoctoral fellowships studies”.
Project results:
During this project, novel organic hole transporting materials (HTMs) with reactive groups will be designed and synthesized in order to obtain interfacially stitched perovskite/HTM compositions with improved device stability. This will prevent direct contact of adventitious water, reduce the density of the grain boundaries, improve charge transport and device stability being a key-step for the commercialization of PSC technology.
Period of project implementation: 2020-09-01 - 2022-10-31
Project coordinator: Kaunas University of Technology
