Design and Simulation of Efficient Perovskite Solar Cells

Abstract

The demand of electricity is increasing day by day. Today this demand is mostly meet by burning coal, oil and natural gas. After depletion of this sources renewable energy will become the main source of electricity for the next generation. Among all the renewable energy sources, solar photovoltaic will be the potential source of energy. Solar cell can convert sunlight directly into electricity. Thin film solar cell becomes more popular because of its low material cost. Perovskite solar cell is recently invented in recent years due to its advantageous features including high absorption, low cost, ease of fabrication and rapidly improving efficiencies. Using organometallic halide Perovskite as absorber layer the efficiency have already increased above 20% in recent years. A Perovskite solar cell is made of three main layers where a Perovskite layer is sandwiched between the n type and p type material. The standard design for a Perovskite solar cell is: Back contact/ Hole transporting material (HTM)/ Perovskite as absorber layer/ Electron transport material (ETM)/ transparent electrode. By increasing the conductivity of the hole transport materials by doping and optimizing charge collection by adjusting the absorber thickness and band gap the efficiency can be improved. Electron transporting materials are also an important component in perovskite based solar cells. Several PV parameters such as thickness of the absorber, Hole transporting material (HTM) and Electron transport material (ETM) respectively can be optimized by simulation methods and subsequently implemented by experimentalist. In this work, we designed a Perovskite solar cell using ZnO as n-type and Cu2O as p-type material, CH3NH3PbI3 (Perovskite) as intrinsic layer material. Considering 300K as room temperature we found the maximum efficiency of 25.29%, with Voc= 0.8082 V, Jsc =36.92 mA/cm2 and FF of 84.74% when absorber layer (CH3NH3PbI3) thickness was 15 μm.