Pinhole-Free and Surface-Nanostructured NiOxFilm by Room-Temperature Solution Process for High-Performance Flexible Perovskite Solar Cells with Good Stability and Reproducibility

Recently, researchers have focused on the design of highly efficient flexible perovskite solar cells (PVSCs), which enables the implementation of portable and roll-to-roll fabrication in large scale. While NiOxis a promising material for hole transport layer (HTL) candidate for fabricating efficient PVSCs on a rigid substrate, the reported NiOxHTLs are formed using different multistep treatments (such as 300–500 °C annealing, O2-plasma, UVO, etc.), which hinders the development of flexible PVSCs based on NiOx. Meanwhile, the features of nanostructured morphology and flawless film quality are very important for the film to function as highly effective HTL of PVSCs. However, it is difficult to have the two features coexist natively, particularly in a solution process that flawless film will usually come with smooth morphology. Here, we demonstrate the flawless and surface-nanostructured NiOxfilm from a simple and controllable room-temperature solution process for achieving high performance flexible PVSCs with good stability and reproducibility. The power conversion efficiency (PCE) can reaches a promising value of 14.53% with no obvious hysteresis (and a high PCE of 17.60% for PVSC on ITO glass). Furthermore, the NiOx-based PVSCs show markedly improved air stability. Regarding the performance improvement, the flawless and surface-nanostructured NiOxfilm can make the interfacial recombination and monomolecular Shockley–Read–Hall recombination of PVSC reduce. In addition, the formation of an intimate junction of large interfacial area at NiOxfilm/the perovskite layer improve the hole extraction and thus PVSC performances. This work contributes to the evolution of flexible PVSCs with simple fabrication process and high device performances.