Stability of perovskite solar cells

Perovskite solar cells (PSC) reach efficiencies beyond 20%, but suffer from severe degradation mechanisms limiting their lifetime. Several degradation mechanisms resulting from thermal and chemical instabilities, phase transformations, exposure to visible and UV light, moisture and oxygen and most importantly sealing issues are thoroughly analyzed in this review. Methods are suggested to study most of these degradation mechanisms in a systematic way. In addition, environmental assessment of PSCs is briefly covered. Alternative materials and their preparation methods are screened with respect to the stability of the device. Overall, this work contributes to developing a better understanding of the degradation mechanisms and help in improving the overall stability of the PSCs. This work was done in collaboration with New Energy Technologies Group from the Department of Applied Physics and Hubei Collaborative Innovation Centre for Advanced Organic Chemical Materials, Faculty of Physics and Electronic Science, Hubei University, Wuhan (China). The work was recently published in a review article ' Device stability of perovskite solar cells – A review'  in Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews 77 (2017) 131–146, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.rser.2017.04.003