Nitin Padture1
Brown University1
Most commercial devices, including photovoltaics (PVs), have gone through a familiar research and development trajectory — increasing performance, upscaling, improving stability, and enhancing mechanical reliability — before making it to the marketplace successfully. In this context, perovskite solar cells (PSCs) are likely to be no exception, but little attention has been paid to the latter issue of mechanical reliability. In fact, enhancing the mechanical reliability of PSCs is particularly important and challenging because the low formation energies of MHPs that makes them easy to solution-process renders them inherently poor in mechanical properties: they are compliant (low Young’s modulus), soft (low hardness), and brittle (low toughness). To address this perhaps final hurdle in the path towards PSCs commercialization, several rationally designed interfacial tailoring approaches are used. These include grain-coarsening, grain-boundary functionalization, and interfacial engineering. Most importantly, these approaches are designed such that they not only enhance the PSCs mechanical reliability but also increase performance and improve stability. The scientific rationales for these approaches are discussed, together with the presentation of the current results.