Abstract
Perovskite solar cells have attracted the attention of the researchers in the last couple of years as a potential photovoltaic device. However, the use of expensive hole transport materials (HTM) in these devices often restricts their commercial adaptability. Thus exploring cost-effective, efficient HTL and ETL materials remain an important challenge to the researchers. In this work, simulation studies are carried out considering cupric oxide (CuO), a relatively inexpensive material as hole transport materials for planar heterojunction perovskite solar cells. The photo-voltaic performance of CuO based hole transport layer (HTL) has been estimated in combination with several electron transport materials (ETM) that include TiO2,SnO2,ZnO, CdS, ZnSe,PCBM and Cd1-xZnxS. Studies predict that among these materials, the Cd1-xZnxS electron transport layer (ETL) could be the most promising to result high photo-voltaic efficiency in combination to CuO based HTL. Also, the thickness and optical band gap of perovskite absorber are optimized in order to achieve maximum photo-voltaic efficiency. The cell efficiency of FTO / Cd1-xZnxS/CH3NH3PbI3/CuO/carbon structure is predicted 25.24% under optimized operational conditions with Voc, Jsc and Fill Factor of 1.1eV,26.32mA/cm2 and 87.14% respectively.