Silver is low cost metal (in comparison to Gold) and have widely been used as top electrode material. In such solar cells, the silver reacts with absorber layer (Methyl Ammonium Lead Iodide) and forms Silver Iodide. This leads to instability in PSCs. Now my question is what are the best low cost metals for top electrode deposition in fabrication of perovskite solar cells (PSCs)?
Dear Hasan,
There are trials to substitute the precious Au and Ag by non precious metals such as copper, Nickel, tungsten and and molybdenum. It is found that the efficiency will decrease because of the higher sheet resistance and the slight reduction of the open circuit voltage. The best metal after the silver was the copper.
For more information of this study please follow the link: Article Non-precious transition metals as counter electrode of perov...
It was shown also that copper is stable for the long time compared to the silver.
Please follow the paper in the link: https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2016/ee/c6ee02980a#!divAbstract
Best wishes
Just a hint from a different area of application (I'm not involved in solar cell R&D):
putting a diffusion barrier underneath the top metallization should prevent the silver (or any other metallization) from reacting with the cell's components. If the components are somewhat volatile, encapsulate the metallization with a top layer of the same barrier.
The usual diffusion barrier metal is Ni, a layer of 10 nm (deposited void free) is absolutely sufficient. Other diffusion barrier metals/materials are available, but way more expensive (e.g. Pt) or maybe not applicable for your use case. (E.g. Titanium nitride is a great barrier compound as well.)
Dear Hasan,
I think Ni/Al- based electrods is the best for perovskite solar cells, in attached I send to you a title of a scientific contribution :
1 --
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/283938523_Numerical_Optimization_of_Lead_Free_Perovskite_Solar_Cell
2- https://www.sciencedirect.com/search/advanced?qs=Ahmer%20A.B.%20Baloch
good luck
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