High-efficiency lead-free perovskite solar cells with MXene and NiO as transport layers: a numerical study

Abstract Perovskite solar cells (PSC) are attracting a lot of interest in the scientific communities. It is one of the most promising candidates for solar cells, providing a maximum efficiency of about 30% in recent years. These PSCs could be fine-tuned to enhance their performance using various transport layers. This work demonstrates the design and analyses of the lead-free, MXene-based solar cell model with the flexible architecture of FTO/Mo 2 TiC 2 /CH 3 NH 3 SnI 3 /NiO. The attention has been focused on the novel two-dimensional materials called MXenes (Mo 2 TiC 2 in present study) as electron transport layer (ETL) and NiO as hole transport layer (HTL). We have demonstrated the effect of transport layers on the overall performance of the device by varying parameters such as thickness, electron affinity, defect density of the absorber, and doping concentrations. The simulations were conducted using the Solar Cell Capacitance Simulator (SCAPS-1D) software to evaluate the performance of the solar cell. Comparisons with different HTL and back metal contacts are also studied for better understanding of the performance. The simulated model shows that the presented device structure has a potential to achieve a maximum efficiency of about 31%. This simulation is expected to provide valuable insight to the solar cell research community to explore MXene based solar cells to investigate further to maximize the efficiency and achieve the practical device.