Robust and Recyclable Substrate Template with an Ultrathin Nanoporous Counter Electrode for Organic-Hole-Conductor-Free Monolithic Perovskite Solar Cells.

A robust and recyclable monolithic substrate applying all-inorganic metal-oxide selective contact with a nanoporous (np) Au:NiOx counter electrode is successfully demonstrated for efficient perovskite solar cells, of which the perovskite active layer is deposited in the final step for device fabrication. Through annealing of the Ni/Au bilayer, the nanoporous NiO/Au electrode is formed in virtue of interconnected Au network embedded in oxidized Ni. By optimizing the annealing parameters and tuning the mesoscopic layer thickness (mp-TiO2 and mp-Al2O3), a decent power conversion efficiency (PCE) of 10.25% is delivered. With mp-TiO2/mp-Al2O3/np-Au:NiOx as a template, the original perovskite solar cell with 8.52% PCE can be rejuvenated by rinsing off the perovskite material with dimethylformamide and refilling with newly deposited perovskite. A renewed device using the recycled substrate once and twice, respectively, achieved a PCE of 8.17 and 7.72% that are comparable to original performance. This demonstrates that the novel device architecture is possible to recycle the expensive transparent conducting glass substrates together with all the electrode constituents. Deposition of stable multicomponent perovskite materials in the template also achieves an efficiency of 8.54%, which shows its versatility for various perovskite materials. The application of such a novel NiO/Au nanoporous electrode has promising potential for commercializing cost-effective, large scale, and robust perovskite solar cells.

Low-temperature sputtered nickel oxide compact thin film as effective electron blocking layer for mesoscopic NiO/CH3NH3PbI3 perovskite heterojunction solar cells.

We introduce the use of low temperature sputtered NiOx thin film, which substitutes the PEDOT-PSS and solution-processed NiOx as an effective electron blocking layer for mesoscopic NiO/CH3NH3PbI3 perovskite solar cells. The influences of film thickness and oxygen doping on the photovoltaic performances are scrutinized. The cell efficiency has been improved from 9.51 to 10.7% for devices using NiOx fabricated under pure argon atmosphere. With adequate doping under 10% oxygen flow ratio, we achieved power conversion efficiency of 11.6%. The procedure is large area scalable and has the advantage for cost-effective perovskite-based photovoltaics.

p-type Mesoscopic nickel oxide/organometallic perovskite heterojunction solar cells.

In this article, we present a new paradigm for organometallic hybrid perovskite solar cell using NiO inorganic metal oxide nanocrystalline as p-type electrode material and realized the first mesoscopic NiO/perovskite/[6,6]-phenyl C61-butyric acid methyl ester (PC61BM) heterojunction photovoltaic device. The photo-induced transient absorption spectroscopy results verified that the architecture is an effective p-type sensitized junction, which is the first inorganic p-type, metal oxide contact material for perovskite-based solar cell. Power conversion efficiency of 9.51% was achieved under AM 1.5 G illumination, which significantly surpassed the reported conventional p-type dye-sensitized solar cells. The replacement of the organic hole transport materials by a p-type metal oxide has the advantages to provide robust device architecture for further development of all-inorganic perovskite-based thin-film solar cells and tandem photovoltaics.