Eco-Friendly KGeCl3 Solar Cells: Performance Enhancement Through HTL Engineering

In this study, a numerical analysis was performed by utilizing SCAPS to investigate the eco-friendly KGeCl3 perovskite as a promising absorber layer in solar cell devices. The solar cell performance was optimized by considering different suitable hole transport layer (HTL) materials. The absorber layer thickness, doping density, and defect density were investigated. The analysis revealed that V2O5 as an HTL provides the best power conversion efficiency (PCE) among all selected HTLs. The optimal performance was achieved with the solar cell structure ITO/IGZO/KGeCl<inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">3</inf>/V<inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</inf>O<inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">5</inf>/Au resulting in a PCE of21.23%, Voc of 0.67 V, Jsc of 42. 04 mA/cm<sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> and FF of 75.39% at an operating temperature of 300 K.