Diffusion-Controlled Crystal Engineering with Diverse Antisolvent Intervention for the Preparation of High-Quality...

Antisolvent engineering is routinely used to modulate the crystallization of perovskite films as they can offer an additional driving force for nucleation. Actually, the intervention of antisolvent into nucleation is thought to involve some relatively fast and complex processes, which, however, are not fully understood so far. Here, the diffusion of the organic amine cation FA⁺ (one dominated precursor) and its distribution in a spin-coating process in different antisolvents is simulated by the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model. It is suggested that a moderate diffusion rate (like that in the case of toluene as an antisolvent) not only enables to form a very uniform distribution of FA⁺ ions on the substrate, beneficial to the uniform nucleation of the intermediate phase, but also can balance the nucleation and growth rates of the intermediate phase, thereby suppressing undesired heterogeneous nucleation and growth. Results show that the perovskite film fabricated using toluene as an antisolvent has a high quality, based on which higher power conversion efficiencies of up to 24.32% are achieved for perovskite solar cells.