All-Rounder Low-Cost Dopant-Free D-A-D Hole-Transporting Materials for Efficient Indoor and Outdoor Performance of Perovskite Solar Cells

Hong Duc Pham, Sagar M. Jain*, Meng Li, Zhao-Kui Wang, Sergei Manzhos, Krishna Feron, Sudhagar Pitchaimuthu, Zhiyong Liu, Nunzio Motta, James R. Durrant, Prashant Sonar

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

75 Citations (Scopus)
37 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

A novel biphenyl fumaronitrile as an acceptor and triphenylamine as donor conjugated building blocks are used for the first time to successfully synthesize donor–acceptor–donor molecule (D-A-D) 2,3-bis(4′-(bis(4-methoxyphenyl)amino)-[1,1′-biphenyl]-4-yl)fumaronitrile (TPA-BPFN-TPA). The new TPA-BPFN-TPA with low-lying HOMO is used as a dopant-free hole-transporting material (HTM) in mesoporous perovskite solar cells. The performance of the solar cells using this new HTM is compared with the traditional 2,2′,7,7′-tetrakis(N,N′-di-p-methoxyphenylamino)- 9,9′-spirobifluorene (Spiro-OMeTAD) HTM based devices for outdoor and indoor performance evaluation. Under 1 sun illumination, dopant-free TPA-BPFN-TPA HTM based devices exhibit a power conversion efficiency (PCE) of 18.4%, which is the record efficiency to date among D-A-D molecular design based dopant-free HTMs. Moreover, the stability of unencapsulated TPA-BPFN-TPA-based devices shows improvement over Spiro-OMeTAD-based devices in harsh relative humidity condition of 70%. Another exciting feature of the newly developed HTM is that the TPA-BPFN-TPA-based devices exhibit improved PCE of 30% and 20.1% at 1000 lux and 200 lux illuminations, respectively. This new finding provides a solution to fabricate low indoor (low light) and outdoor (1 sun) perovskite solar cell devices with high efficiency for cutting-edge energy harvesting technology.

Original languageEnglish
Article number1900884
JournalAdvanced Electronic Materials
Volume6
Issue number4
Early online date15 Jan 2020
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 14 Apr 2020

Keywords

  • biphenyl fumaronitrile
  • dopant-free materials
  • perovskite solar cells
  • triphenylamine

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials

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