Issue 84, 2017

Facile synthesis of a dopant-free hole transporting material with a phenothiazine core for planar perovskite solar cells

Abstract

A novel electron-rich small-molecule, 4,4′-(10-(4-octylphenyl)-10H-phenothiazine-3,7-diyl)bis(N,N-(4-methoxyphenyl)anilene) (PTZ-TPA), containing phenothiazine as the core with triphenylamine side groups, was synthesized via a Suzuki–Miyaura cross-coupling reaction. When PTZ-TPA was incorporated into a CH3NH3PbI3 perovskite solar cell as a dopant-free hole transporting material (HTM), a short circuit photocurrent density of 21.5 mA cm−2, an open circuit voltage of 0.982 V, and a fill factor of 0.679 were obtained, giving rise to an overall power conversion efficiency of 14.3%, which is comparable to the power conversion efficiency obtained using the current state-of-the-art HTM 2,20,7,70-tetrakis(N,N′-di-p-methoxyphenylamine)-9,90-spirobifluorene with dopant (Spiro-MeOTAD, power conversion efficiency of 17.1%). PTZ-TPA is thus a promising HTM with the potential to replace the expensive Spiro-MeOTAD owing to its comparable performance and much simpler synthesis route; it also presented a better stability during a one week aging test compared with Spiro-MeOTAD.

Graphical abstract: Facile synthesis of a dopant-free hole transporting material with a phenothiazine core for planar perovskite solar cells

Supplementary files

Article information

Article type
Paper
Submitted
27 Sep 2017
Accepted
13 Nov 2017
First published
22 Nov 2017
This article is Open Access
Creative Commons BY license

RSC Adv., 2017,7, 53604-53610

Facile synthesis of a dopant-free hole transporting material with a phenothiazine core for planar perovskite solar cells

X. Liu, X. Tan, Q. Chen, H. Shan, C. Liu, J. Xu, Z. Chen, W. Huang and Z. Xu, RSC Adv., 2017, 7, 53604 DOI: 10.1039/C7RA10677G

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported Licence. You can use material from this article in other publications without requesting further permissions from the RSC, provided that the correct acknowledgement is given.

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