Effect of Electron Transporting Layer on Power Conversion Efficiency of Perovskite-Based Solar Cell: Comparative Study

Recently, photovoltaic energy is growing up rapidly especially in solar cell fabrication. Perovskite-based solar cell technology has been focus of interest from photovoltaic technologies due to its high power conversion efficiency and low processing cost comparing by others. The first step in solar cell fabrication is the simulation, which gives an idea about effect of different parameters on power conversion efficiently with less efforts and costs. There are a lot of software that are used in solar cell simulations, such as GPVDM, SCAPS and Silvaco Atlas. Therefore, several structures are used in perovskite-based solar cells, such as n-i-p, p-i-n, n-p-p and p-p-n. Our study is focused on n-i-p structure. For the present paper we used Silvaco Atlas software because it contains a lot of physical and recombination models based on solving the Poisson partial differential equation and carrier continuity. Moreover, this paper shows numerical simulations of planar heterojunction solar cell structures that have the following layers: hole transporting layer (HTL)/perovskite absorber layer (PVK)/electron transporting layer (ETL). However, different layer materials of ETL are used, namely cadmium sulfide (CdS) and zink oxide (ZnO) in order to study the behavior of solar cells based on perovskite (CH3NH3PbI3). This latter material used in this paper's simulation belongs to organic/inorganic type. The obtained results show that the solar cell structure based on CdS exhibits a better performance in term of power conversion efficiency (PCE) compared to that based on ZnO when using the same layer thickness.