Optimizing Fabrication Methods for Cost-Effective Monolithic Perovskite Solar Cells

Student’s name: Laura James Home Institution: Hampton University NNCI Site: RTNN @ University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill REU Principal Investigator: Dr. Andrew Moran– Department of Chemistry, UNC-Chapel Hill REU Mentor: Saba Madmoodpour, Department of Chemistry, UNC Chapel Hill Abstract: One of the main challenges of perovskite solar cells is that they are more complex and expensive to fabricate. Typical perovskite photovoltaics require copper to be evaporated onto the surface at high temperatures in a vacuum chamber. This fabrication process is more difficult compared to perovskite solar cell kits, which only involve drop-casting on a prefabricated semiconductor film. For the summer research conducted at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, we used monolithic perovskite solar cell kits which could present a cost-effective and simplified alternative to conventional perovskite solar cells. Fabricating twenty-four solar cells, a series of steps were followed but changed slightly for each "batch" -- approximately two to five composing each. Various steps within the fabrication process were tested and optimized, and each batch was evaluated for its efficiency through illumination using a 405 nm diode laser. By normalizing the electrons extracted from the device to the number of photons absorbed, the measured efficiency ranged from 0.06% to 0.17%. Our findings suggest that monolithic perovskite solar cell kits can be effectively produced as an alternative to conventional methods of typical perovskite photovoltaic cells.