Flash infrared annealing as a cost-effective and low environmental impact processing method for planar perovskite solar cells

Abstract

For successful commercialization of perovskite solar cells, straightforward solutions in terms of environmental impact and economic feasibility are still required. Flash Infrared Annealing (FIRA) is a rapid method to fabricate perovskite solar cells with efficiencies >18% on simple, planar architecture, which allows a film synthesis in only 1.2 s, faster than the previous report based in a meso architecture and all of them without the usage of antisolvent. In this work, through a comparative study with the common lab-scale method, the so-called antisolvent (AS), the main photovoltaic parameters and working mechanisms obtained from impedance spectroscopy (IS) measurements show similar device features as for FIRA. However, from the life cycle assessment (LCA) comparison study, the FIRA method has only 8% of the environmental impact and 2% of the fabrication cost of the perovskite active layer with respect to the AS for the perovskite film synthesis. These results denote that FIRA is a low-impact, cost-effective fabrication approach that can be directly adapted to perovskite planar configuration that is compatible with industrial up-scaling.