Introduction to Perovskite Solar Cells in an Undergraduate Laboratory Exercise

Sammanfattning: The course Functional Materials at Karlstad University aims for undergraduates to study some of the functional materials of the 21st century. One of the hottest topics in photovoltaic research is hybrid organic-inorganic perovskite solar cells due to their easy methods of fabrication, cheap costs and potential for high power conversion efficiencies. A laboratory manual is compiled for the course, in which students are encouraged to build perovskite solar cells with a device architecture of FTO/TiO2/MAPbI3/CuSCN/Carbon/FTO using spin coating and annealing for testing in a solar simulator. The power conversion efficiency achieved with this method reaches 0.056 %, with suggestions for improvement when done by students. Absorption properties are examined using UV-vis spectroscopy and the band gap energy of MAPbI3 is established as 1.59 eV. By using these techniques, students will earn a greater understanding for one of the most relevant topics of photovoltaic research and different equipment used in its fabrication and characterization.