Flame-made ultra-porous TiO2 layers for perovskite solar cells

We report methyl ammonium lead iodide (MAPbI(3)) solar cells with an ultra-porous TiO2 electron transport layer fabricated using sequential flame aerosol and atomic layer depositions of porous and compact TiO2 layers. Flame aerosol pyrolysis allows rapid deposition of nanostructured and ultra-porous TiO2 layers that could be easily scaled-up for high-throughput low-cost industrial solar cell production. An efficiency of 13.7% was achieved with a flame-made nanostructured and ultra-porous TiO2 electrode that was coated with a compact 2 nm TiO2 layer. This demonstrates that MAPbI(3) solar cells with a flame-made porous TiO2 layer can have a comparable efficiency to that of the control MAPbI3 solar cell with the well-established spin-coated porous TiO2 layer. The combination of flame aerosol and atomic layer deposition provides precise control of the TiO2 porosity. Notably, the porosity of the as-deposited flame-made TiO2 layers was 97% which was then fine-tuned down to 87%, 56% and 35% by varying the thickness of the subsequent compact TiO2 coating step. The effects of the decrease in porosity on the device performance are discussed. It is also shown that MAPbI(3) easily infiltrates into the flame-made porous TiO2 nanostructure thanks to their high porosity and large pore size.