Efficient solar trapping with vanadium oxide hole transport layer in perovskite solar cells

Abstract Proper selection of the hole transport material is essential for improving the stability of perovskite solar cell devices under open environmental conditions. Therefore, it is necessary to introduce a hole material that can resist moisture absorption and shows a less hygroscopic tendency compared to other organic/inorganic hole materials. Vanadium oxide (V 2 O 5 ) exhibits these desirable properties. In this research, the primary focus is to analyze the performance of formamidinium lead iodide (FAPbI 3 ) and methyl ammonium antimony iodide (MA 3 Sb 2 I 9 ) perovskite solar cells with the hole transport layer (HTL) as Vanadium Oxide (V 2 O 5 ). FAPbI 3 and MA 3 Sb 2 I 9 are lead and lead-free materials respectively. Numerical simulator SCAPS-1D software has been utilized for analyzing the effect of V 2 O 5 on their performance efficiency under the photo illumination of AM1.5G. Incorporation of V 2 O 5 as an HTL in FAPbI 3 and MA 3 Sb 2 I 9 based perovskite solar cells resulted in performance efficiency of 25.04% and 7.07% respectively at optimized simulation parameters (ETL (50 nm)/perovskite layer(350 nm)/HTL (300 nm)). The optimized PSCs configurations ITO/ZnO/FAPbI 3 /V 2 O 5 /Au and ITO/ZnO/ MA 3 Sb 2 I 9 /V 2 O 5 /Au shows open circuit voltage (V oc ), current density (J sc ) and fill factor (FF) values of 1.29 V, 23.08 mA cm −2 , 84.06% and 1.31 V, 6.77 mA cm −2 , 79.10% respectively. In the meantime, the effect of perovskite layer thickness, the effect of hole/electron layer (HTL/ETL) thickness, the impact of perovskite layer doping, and the effect of temperature variations have also been analyzed. The thorough analysis of the proposed device provides a reference for the future development of highly efficient and stable perovskite solar cells using V 2 O 5 as an HTL.