Prolonged Lifetime of Perovskite Solar Cells Using a Moisture-Blocked and Temperature-Controlled Encapsulation System Comprising a Phase Change Material as a Cooling Agent.

Although the power conversion efficiency of perovskite solar cells (PSCs) reached up to 25% that made them comparable to the commercial solar cells, they are facing issues toward commercialization, especially their short lifetime. Remarkably, the most important key factors that regulate the durability of the devices are moisture, light, and heat. In this work, prolonging the device lifetime is focused by designing a flexible moisture-blocked and temperature-controlled encapsulation system. In this regard, a thermally adjusted phase change material is embedded in a polymer encapsulation layer to avoid the moisture diffusion, rapid temperature fluctuation, and undesired crystalline phase change of the perovskite layer in the PSCs under the operation condition. As a result, a 2 year stable device is achieved, whereas the reference device loses more than 50% of its performance after 10 days. Surprisingly, the charge transport resistance and recombination rate show no significant change during 450 days of storage, which confirms no increase in the defect density.

High Power UV-Light Irradiation as a New Method for Defect Passivation in Degraded Perovskite Solar Cells to Recover and Enhance the Performance.

Although the power conversion efficiency (PCE) of perovskite solar cells (PSCs) reached up to 23%, their short lifetime and fast degradation still remain as the main challenges. In this work, a new facile optical method based on the high power UV-irradiation is presented for the recovery of the degraded PSCs. Addition to the full recovery of the performance, about 20% PCE enhancement and hystersis reduction are also achieved by UV-irradiation. UV-treatment causes modifications in both the bulk properties of the perovskite layer and the energy equilibrium at the interfaces. It is shown that UV-treatment effectively passivates the surface and grain boundaries defects in different types of the devices comprising normal and inverted configurations that is confirmed by the reduction of the density of defect states (DOS). It is proposed that UV-light passivates the shallow and deep defects by dissociation of adsorbed hydroxyl groups and water molecules during the device storage.