Single-Walled Carbon Nanotube Film as Electrode in Indium-Free Planar Heterojunction Perovskite Solar Cells: Investigation of Electron-Blocking Layers and Dopants

Il Jeon; Takaaki Chiba; Clement Delacou; Yunlong Guo; Antti Kaskela; Olivier Reynaud; Esko I Kauppinen; Shigeo Maruyama; Yutaka Matsuo

doi:10.1021/acs.nanolett.5b02490

Single-Walled Carbon Nanotube Film as Electrode in Indium-Free Planar Heterojunction Perovskite Solar Cells: Investigation of Electron-Blocking Layers and Dopants

Nano Lett. 2015 Oct 14;15(10):6665-71. doi: 10.1021/acs.nanolett.5b02490. Epub 2015 Sep 3.

Authors

Il Jeon¹, Takaaki Chiba², Clement Delacou², Yunlong Guo¹, Antti Kaskela³, Olivier Reynaud³, Esko I Kauppinen³, Shigeo Maruyama^{2

4}, Yutaka Matsuo¹

Affiliations

¹ Department of Chemistry, School of Science, The University of Tokyo , 7-3-1 Hongo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 113-0033, Japan.
² Department of Mechanical Engineering, School of Engineering, The University of Tokyo , 7-3-1 Hongo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 113-8656, Japan.
³ Department of Applied Physics, Aalto University School of Science , 15100, FI-00076 Aalto, Finland.
⁴ National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) , 1-2-1 Namiki, Tsukuba 305-8564, Japan.

PMID: 26327329
DOI: 10.1021/acs.nanolett.5b02490

Abstract

In this work, we fabricated indium-free perovskite solar cells (SCs) using direct- and dry-transferred aerosol single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWNTs). We investigated diverse methodologies to solve SWNTs' hydrophobicity and doping issues in SC devices. These include changing wettability of poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene)/poly(styrenesulfonate) (

Pedot: PSS), MoO3 thermal doping, and HNO3(aq) doping with various dilutions from 15 to 70 v/v% to minimize its instability and toxic nature. We discovered that isopropanol (IPA) modified

Pedot: PSS works better than surfactant modified

Pedot: PSS as an electron-blocking layer on SWNTs in perovskite SCs due to superior wettability, whereas MoO3 is not compatible owing to energy level mismatching. Diluted HNO3 (35 v/v%)-doped SWNT-based device produced the highest PCE of 6.32% among SWNT-based perovskite SCs, which is 70% of an indium tin oxide (ITO)-based device (9.05%). Its flexible application showed a PCE of 5.38% on polyethylene terephthalate (PET) substrate.

Keywords: ITO-free; MoO3 doping; PEDOT:PSS modification; carbon nanotube; flexible solar cell; perovskite solar cell.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't