Preventing lead leakage with built-in resin layers for sustainable perovskite solar cells

Shangshang Chen, Yehao Deng, Xun Xiao, Shuang Xu, Peter N. Rudd and Jinsong Huang ()
Additional contact information
Shangshang Chen: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Yehao Deng: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Xun Xiao: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Shuang Xu: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Peter N. Rudd: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Jinsong Huang: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Nature Sustainability, 2021, vol. 4, issue 7, 636-643

Abstract: Abstract Lead leakage from damaged perovskite solar modules during rainfall poses a serious threat to the environment and human health. Strategies to replace lead have seen little success to date, while the encapsulation approaches tend to compromise the low-cost advantage of perovskites. Coating lead-adsorbing layers on glass surfaces may help to reduce the risk; however, these layers are vulnerable to either saturation or contamination by rain or dust. Here we report a new device structure that incorporates a low-cost mesoporous sulfonic acid-based lead-adsorbing resin into perovskites as a scaffold, which immobilizes lead ions inside the scaffold even if perovskites are exposed to rainwater. Introducing the insulating scaffold not only does not decrease the device efficiency, but also can be scaled up to large-area modules (60.8 cm2) with an aperture efficiency of 16.3%. This structure proves more effective in preventing lead leakage than the configuration with the coating on the glass surface and is able to reduce the lead contamination of rainwater from damaged perovskite modules to 11.9 parts per billion. This solution addresses the toxicity concern of lead-based perovskites for solar cells and other applications and represents an important step towards sustainability.

Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-021-00701-x Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natsus:v:4:y:2021:i:7:d:10.1038_s41893-021-00701-x

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/natsustain/

DOI: 10.1038/s41893-021-00701-x

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Sustainability is currently edited by Monica Contestabile

More articles in Nature Sustainability from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().