Efficient Blade-Coated Wide-Bandgap and Tandem Perovskite Solar Cells via a Three-Step Restraining Strategy

Abstract

Blade-coating techniques have attracted significant attention for perovskite solar cells (PSCs) due to their high precursor utilization and simplicity. However, the power conversion efficiency (PCE) of blade-coated PSCs often lags behind that of spin-coated devices, mainly due to difficulties in precisely controlling perovskite film formation during pre-nucleation, heterogeneous nucleation, and crystallization in the blade-coating and N₂-knife drying processes. In this work, a three-step restraining strategy is introduced utilizing functional glycine amide hydrochloride to regulate pre-nucleation clustering, suppress excessive heterogeneous nucleation, and decelerate crystallization, enabling comprehensive control of the perovskite film formation processes. This approach results in enlarged grains, reduced defect densities, and highly oriented crystalline wide-bandgap perovskite films with significantly prolonged carrier lifetimes, achieving a maximum PCE of 19.97% for 1.77 eV-bandgap blade-coated PSCs. Furthermore, two-terminal tandem cells, composed of wide-bandgap perovskite top cells and 1.25 eV-bandgap perovskite bottom cells fabricated via blade coating, yield an impressive PCE of 27.11% (stabilized at 26.87%). This study offers comprehensive insights into controlling pre-nucleation, heterogeneous nucleation, and crystallization during blade coating, providing valuable guidance for developing high-performance, large-area devices in the future.

Keywords: blade coating; crystallization; heterogenous nucleation; perovskites; pre‐nucleation.