Engineering scalable device architectures for lead sulfide quantum dot solar cells
Name
1102051276-MIT.pdf
Size
13.34 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
d2c0153767264636aee2fb22eeab6080
Author(s)
Wassweiler, Ella Louise.
Advisor(s)
Vladimir Bulović.
Date Issued
2019
Publisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Abstract
In recent years flexible and lightweight solar cell technologies have emerged as complements to silicon solar panels in the rapidly growing clean energy industry. As one of these new technologies, quantum dot solar cells have shown remarkable shelf life stability with increasingly competitive power conversion efficiencies, yet remain very expensive to manufacture. Some of these production costs are due to expensive materials used in the quantum dot solar cell device stack, namely gold electrodes. While gold cannot be used on a commercial scale, there are less expensive but more chemically reactive materials that can be used. Replacing gold with aluminum or copper in quantum dot solar cells would cut material costs by a factor of 12,000. In this work, I develop a new quantum dot solar cell architecture that maintains power conversion efficiency while dramatically reducing the electrode material costs. The electrical and optical properties of a nickel oxide film are developed for a new hole-transporting buffer layer as I determine how deposition conditions impact the sputtered film. I integrate the sputtered nickel oxide film into a new quantum dot solar cell architecture that enables aluminum or copper electrodes to be used instead of gold. Finally, I characterize the storage stability of the proposed architecture and investigate strategies for enhancing stability of devices containing chemically reactive top electrodes. By improving the storage stability of the new architecture, efficient quantum dot solar cells move closer to the production line.
Description
Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2019
Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references (pages 81-83).
Subjects
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
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