Chemistry Weekly Seminar - PhD Candidate Soumya Kundu

Title:

Understanding the Moisture Instability and Improving the Stability of Perovskite Solar Cells

Abstract:

In recent years, perovskite solar cells have emerged as a low cost, promising photovoltaic technology. The light-harvesting active material of these solar cells is hybrid organic-inorganic lead halide based compounds which have the perovskite crystal structure. The power conversation efficiency of perovskite solar cells has improved from 3.1% to more than 23% over the past few years. This is due to their excellent optoelectronic properties, like high charge carrier mobilities, direct band gaps, long charge carrier diffusion lengths, and high absorption coefficients. However, environmental stresses like moisture can cause serious damage to the perovskite active layer, resulting in complete device failure within a few hours. It is very important to improve the moisture stability of these devices for commercialization. This presentation will focus on my efforts to improve the stability of perovskite solar cells towards moisture using two different approaches. The first approach focuses on applying hydrophobic barrier layers as hole-transport layers to improve the lifetime of the devices, whereas, the second one is to find stable compositions of perovskite in order to increase the stability of the devices.