Ultrasmooth Perovskite Film via Mixed Anti-Solvent Strategy with Improved Efficiency

• Published in: ACS applied materials & interfaces Vol. 9; no. 4; pp. 3667 - 3676
• Main Authors: Yu, Yu, Yang, Songwang, Lei, Lei, Cao, Qipeng, Shao, Jun, Zhang, Sheng, Liu, Yan
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States American Chemical Society 01.02.2017
• Subjects: ultrasmooth film; perovskite solar cell; transformation process; mixed antisolvent; nucleation density
• ISSN: 1944-8244; 1944-8252
• DOI: 10.1021/acsami.6b14270

Most antisolvents employed in previous research were miscible with perovskite precursor solution. They always led to fast formation of perovskite even if the intermediate stage existed, which was not beneficial to obtain high quality perovskite films and made the formation process less controllable. In this work, a novel ethyl ether/n-hexane mixed antisolvent (MAS) was used to achieve high nucleation density and slow down the formation process of perovskite, producing films with improved orientation of grains and ultrasmooth surfaces. These high quality films exhibited efficient charge transport at the interface of perovskite/hole transport material and perovskite solar cells based on these films showed greatly improved performance with the best power conversion efficiency of 17.08%. This work also proposed a selection principle of MAS and showed that solvent engineering by designing the mixed antisolvent system can lead to the fabrication of high-performance perovskite solar cells.