Pivotal avenue for hybrid electron transport layer-based perovskite solar cells with improved efficiency

This study conducted a simulative analysis of different hybrid perovskite solar cells with various hybrid electron transport layers (ETL) and hole transport layers (HTL). The electron transport layer boosts durability, lowers production costs, increases stability, improves light absorption, and increases efficiency. Hybrid ETLs are taken into consideration to improve the device's performance. The selected hybrid ETLs (PCBM-SnS₂, TiO₂-SnO₂, and PCBM-PCPB) were modeled with four hybrid perovskite absorbers (CsPbI₃, FAPbI₃, MAPbI_3, and FAMAPbI₃) and five HTLs (PEDOT: PSS, CuI, Spiro-OMeTAD, CBTS, and NiO). Three sets of solar cells are found to be the most effective configurations after investigating over sixty different combinations of perovskite solar cell architectures. The structures show CBTS as the efficient HTL for FAMAPbI₃ with all three hybrid ETLs. Besides, a holistic analysis of the effect of several factors such as the defect density and thickness of the absorber layer, temperature, parasitic resistances, capacitance, Mott-Schottky, impedance, conduction band offset, and current density-voltage and quantum efficiency characteristics is performed. The results show a maximum power conversion efficiency of 25.57%, 26.35%, and 23.36% with PCBM-SnS₂, TiO₂-SnO₂, and PCBM-PCPB respectively. Among the studied hybrid ETLs, perovskite solar cell associated with TiO₂-SnO₂ has depicted a superior performance (Voc = 1.12 V, Jsc = 26.88 mA/cm², FF = 87.27%). The efficiency of the perovskite solar cell using this study has been drastically enhanced compared to the previous experimental report. The proposed strategy provides a new avenue for attaining clean energy and allows researchers to pave the way for further design optimization to obtain high-performance solar cell devices.