Fabrication Of TiO₂ Thin Film By Microwave Hydrolysis And Application In Perovskite Solar Cells

With significant advantages such as simple fabrication,low cost and high photovoltaic conversion efficiency,perovskite solar cells?PSCs?have become the most extensively studied topic in the field of photovoltaics in recent years.Electron transport layer?ETL?,as an indispensable part of PSCs,the properties of it has significantly affect the cell efficiency.TiO₂film is the most commonly used ETL material,and its quality is highly related to the preparation method,structure,morphology and crystal phase of the film.In this paper,microwave hydrolysis was introduced to grow TiO₂ thin film.With microwave heating,compact TiO₂ thin film has grown and porous like TiO₂ has formed in one step within few minutes,and the TiO₂ particles with uniform size were proven to be anatase phase.The mechanism of microwave hydrolysis was preliminary explored.Controlled variable experiments were being implemented to reveal the effect of FTO?Fluorine-doped Tin Dioxide?,microwave power,reaction time and solution concentration to the formation of thin film.It has been the first time that TiO₂ film prepared by microwave hydrolysis was applied as ETL in PSCs in this paper.To prove the advantage of microwave hydrolysis over traditional spin coating and annealing method,the structure,morphology,and crystal phase of the film prepared by these two methods have been characterized.The electrical properties of corresponding PSCs have also been measured.The results showed PSCs using film from microwave hydrolysis as ETL obtained an efficiency of6.91%,which was close to the device efficiency 7.33%using film fabricated by traditional method.The former also has a higher open circuit voltage?1.01V?and a higher short circuit current density?14.39mA/cm²?with a fill factor of 0.47.On this basis,combined with the research work of this paper,some suggestions for improving the efficiency using microwave hydrolysis has also been proposed.