Design and simulation of high efficiency lead-free heterostructure perovskite solar cell using SCAPS-1D

Perovskite materials still show a great interest in solar cell applications due to their promising performance. One of the prime candidates that have been widely investigated by several studies is CH3NH3PbI3. However, the toxicity of the lead used in this class of material limits its applications in large-scale perovskite solar cells industry, and force to search on alternative lead-free perovskite materials. In this paper, we designed and simulated a lead-free p-i-n type heterostructure perovskite solar cell formed from CH3NH3SnI3 as a i- and p-layer and CH3NH3SnCl3 as an n layer by employing the one-dimensional solar cell capacitance simulator (SCAPS-1D). The results show that a moderate thickness of 200 nm of the absorber layer is necessary for achieving a good cell efficiency. The simulations showed that high-doping concentration in the absorber layer is not desirable due to its influence in reducing the efficiency, and increasing the defect density in the absorber layer leads to deterioration in the device performance. In addition, a significant efficiency decrease was observed upon increasing the operating device temperature. Careful optimization of the device parameters has resulted in a significant improvement of the performance parameters and the optimal performance of the solar cell was obtained at PCE of 24.81 %, JSC of 28.11 mA/cm2, VOC of 1.00 V, and FF of 87.69 %. The simulated model concludes a great potential toward the fabrication of high-efficiency solar cell devices using lead-free perovskite materials.