Date of Award

2020

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Organizational Unit

Daniel Felix Ritchie School of Engineering and Computer Science, Mechanical and Materials Engineering

First Advisor

Davor Balzar

Second Advisor

Najm Alhosiny

Third Advisor

Tracy Xu

Keywords

Computation, Doping, Fabrication, Nanoscience, Perovskite, Solar cells

Abstract

Discovering the potential of organic-inorganic metal halide perovskites (MHP) as a harvesting material in solar cells has strongly affected the research direction in solar energy. The fascinating optical and electronic properties offered by MHP combined with tremendous effort from scientists around the world have improved the efficiency to about 25% in a decade.

In the first part of the dissertation, we studied the lamination process as a new fabrication method for producing self-encapsulated perovskite solar cells based on laminating half stacks,as opposed to the conventional layer-by-layer method. Our work focused on optimizing the lamination process of complex triple cations perovskite FAMACs [Cs0:05(MA0:17FA0:83)0:95P b(I0:83Br0:17)3] under moderate temperature and pressure, which was accomplished for the first time. After successfully optimizing a reproducible recipe for laminating perovskite active layer, we investigated the effect of lamination on the optical and electronic properties of FAMACs. The promising results confirmed the positive effect of lamination on FAMACs, and paved the path to investigate new solution- based selective materials that were unattainable in the standard process due to solvent incompatibility and thermal budgeting.

In the second part of this dissertation, we developed a new Atomic Layer Deposition (ALD) process to produce SnO2 thin film (ALD - SnO2) as electron transport layer, which can be scaled up for industrial production. We investigated and optimized experimentally the effect of layer thickness, the seeding layer thickness, and the thermal annealing on the device performance and achieved efficiency of 16.23%.

In the last part of the dissertation, we investigated the possibility of finding lead-free material by using Density Functional Theory.We Validated this computational study by finding energetically stable crystal structure of methylammonium lead iodide (MAPbI3) at different temperatures, followed by the computational studies of the crystal structure of lead-free, double perovskite Cs2BiAgX3.

Publication Statement

Copyright is held by the author. User is responsible for all copyright compliance.

Rights Holder

Amani Hussain Alfaifi

Provenance

Received from ProQuest

File Format

application/pdf

Language

en

File Size

251 p.

Discipline

Nanoscience, Chemical engineering, Physics

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