Bioinspired Stability Enhancement in Deuterium-Substituted Organic-Inorganic Hybrid Perovskite Solar Cells: Article No. pgad160

Jinhui Tong, Xun Li, Jianxin Wang, Haiying He, Tao Xu, Kai Zhu

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

1 Scopus Citations

Abstract

In hybrid perovskite solar cells (PSCs), the reaction of hydrogens (H) located in the amino group of the organic A-site cations with their neighboring halides plays a central role in degradation. Inspired by the retarded biological activities of cells in heavy water, we replaced the light H atom with its abundant, twice-as-heavy, nonradioactive isotope, deuterium (D) to hamper the motion of H. This D substitution retarded the formation kinetics of the detrimental H halides in Pb-based PSCs, as well as the H bond-mediated oxidation of Sn2+ in Sn-Pb-based narrow-bandgap PSCs, evidenced by accelerated stability studies. A computational study indicated that the zero point energy of D-based formamidinium (FA) is lower than that of pristine FA. In addition, the smaller increase in entropy in D-based FA than in pristine FA accounts for the increased formation free energy of the Sn2+ vacancies, which leads to the retarded oxidation kinetics of Sn2+. In this study, we show that substituting active H with D in organic cations is an effective way to enhance the stability of PSCs without sacrificing photovoltaic (PV) performance. This approach is also adaptable to other stabilizing methods.
Original languageAmerican English
Number of pages9
JournalPNAS Nexus
Volume2
Issue number5
DOIs
StatePublished - 2023

NREL Publication Number

  • NREL/JA-5900-86171

Keywords

  • degradation
  • deuterium
  • hybrid perovskite
  • kinetics
  • solar cells
  • stability

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