Efficient and environmental-friendly perovskite solar cells via embedding plasmonic nanoparticles: an optical simulation study on realistic device architecture

TL;DR

This study uses optical simulations to demonstrate that embedding plasmonic nanoparticles in perovskite solar cells can significantly enhance light absorption and photocurrent, enabling thinner, less toxic, and more efficient devices.

Contribution

It is the first to theoretically analyze the effects of various plasmonic nanoparticles in realistic perovskite solar cell architectures, providing design guidelines for improved performance.

Findings

Photocurrent enhancement of up to 7.3% with silver nanoparticles in perovskite.

Further enhancement of up to 12% with combined silver and aluminum nanoparticles.

Thinner perovskite layers (150 nm) can achieve similar performance, reducing toxicity.

Abstract

Solution-processed, lead halide-based perovskite solar cells have overcome important challenges over the recent years, offering low-cost and high solar power conversion efficiencies. However, they still undergo unoptimized light collection due mainly to the thin (~350 nm) polycrystalline absorber layers. Moreover, their high toxicity (due to the presence of lead in the perovskite crystalline structure) makes it necessary that the thickness of the absorber layers to be further reduced, for their future commercialization, without reducing the device performance. Here we aim to address these issues via embedding spherical plasmonic nanoparticles of various sizes, composition, concentrations, and vertical positions, for the first time in realistic halide-based perovskite solar cells architecture, and to clarify their effect on the absorption properties and enhancement. We theoretically show that plasmon-enhanced near-field effects and scattering leads to a device photocurrent enhancement of up to ~7.3% when silver spheres are embedded inside the perovskite layer. Interestingly, the combination of silver spheres in perovskite and aluminum spheres inside the hole transporting layer (PEDOT:PSS) of the solar cell leads to an even further enhancement, of up to ~12%. This approach allows the employment of much thinner perovskite layers in PSCs (up to 150 nm) to reach the same photocurrent as the nanoparticles-free device and reducing thus significantly the toxicity of the device. Providing the requirements related to the size, shape, position, composition, and concentration of nanoparticles for the PSCs photocurrent enhancement, our study establishes guidelines for a future development of highly-efficient, environmentally friendly and low-cost plasmonic perovskite solar cells.