Interfaces, Stability and Energy Efficiency: Photo-chemical Characterisation of Perovskites for Printable Photovoltaics

This project aims to investigate the photochemistry of perovskites to better understand their performance and degradation behaviour, particularly in printable perovskite devices. To assess the environmental impact of lead-based perovskites and investigate methods to reduce this impact. The main focus of reducing the lead impact is to account for all the lead at end-of-life and thus the project is aiming to systematically determine the lead content of devices before and after manufacturing and after multiple re-manufacturing cycles with UV/Vis, fluorescence spectroscopy and microwave plasma-atomic emission spectroscopy. The work also involving tuning the deposition of the perovskite material to understand the effect of deposition (i.e. 1 step vs 2-step deposition) on the degradation and the subsequent re-manufacture to determine the "re-manufacturability" of devices. The ultimate aim is to understand how re-manufacturing cycles affects the fundamental properties of the perovskite material, how many times the material can by cycled and to determine standardised protocol for doing so with accounting for all the lead in the system and ensuring no lead leeching from devices. For the studies on remanufacturing the photophysical properties of the film are studied with UV/Vis and steady state and time resolved fluorescence measurements and the morphology is monitored with XRD.