Nanocrystalline Flash Annealed Nickel Oxide for Large Area Perovskite Solar Cells

The industrialization of perovskite solar cells requires adequate materials and processes to make them economically viable and environmentally sustainable. Despite promising results in terms of power conversion efficiency and operational stability, several hole-transport layers currently in use still need to prove their industrial feasibility. This work demonstrates the use of nanocrystalline nickel oxide produced through flash infrared annealing (FIRA), considerably reducing the materials cost, production time, energy, and the amount of solvents required for the hole transport layer. X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy reveals a better conversion to nickel oxide and a higher oxygen-to-nickel ratio for the FIRA films as compared to control annealing methods, resulting in higher device efficiency and operational stability. Planar inverted solar cells produced with triple cation perovskite absorber result in 16.7% power conversion efficiency for 1 cm(2) devices, and 15.9% averaged over an area of 17 cm(2).