Browsing by Subject "Halide perovskites"

In recent decades, more and more attention has been paid to solar energy because of the need to ensure “green” and sustainable future. Solar cells have been treated as one of the most promising technologies for solar energy utilization. Since conversion of sunlight into electricity mainly passes through the light absorbing material (absorber), its optoelectronic properties largely determine the cell performance. Among the existing absorbers, inorganic lead-free perovskites, like CsSnI3, are of great interest due to high potential efficiency, increased stability and the absence of toxic components. However, currently used fabrication techniques limit quality of the materials and their application in large-scale production. Atomic layer deposition (ALD) is a thin film fabrication technique which is now widely used in electronics and optoelectronics. Based on the principle of sequential saturated surface reactions, it is able to provide almost atomic level control over the thickness and composition of the film. Moreover, the principle ensures the formation of uniform films on large surfaces. Since precise composition control and scalability are of great importance for efficiency of perovskite solar cells, ALD acts as an excellent tool for production of this type of absorbers. The literature review of this thesis examines perovskites as absorber material for commercially efficient solar cells. The aim is to give the reader an overview of solar cell performance, currently available absorber materials and motivation for perovskites to become promising cost-efficient solution. Additionally, the most common fabrication techniques for perovskite structures are introduced together with limitations to emphasize the expediency of further experiments. The experimental part combines development of SnI2 thin film deposition in ALD reactor with a subsequent use of the technique in conversion to perovskite for future solar cell application. Unfortunately, the applicability of SnI2 ALD with proposed chemical process became doubted due to multitude issues that arose during the investigation. However, successful results on SnI2 pulsed chemical vapor deposition (pCVD) in the same ALD reactor supported feasibility of the chemical process. Application of the optimized pCVD technique for the conversion of CsI thin films, prepared by ALD, made it possible to obtain phase-pure CsSnI3 perovskite. In addition, conversion part demonstrates that use of SnI2 pCVD allows the formation of uniform and conformal perovskite thin films with promising band gap of 1.7 eV.