Enhanced Stability of Perovskite Solar Cells with Low‐Temperature Hydrothermally Grown SnO2 Electron Transport Layers

Perovskite solar cells (PSCs) may offer huge potential in photovoltaic conversion, yet their practical applications face one major obstacle: their low stability, or quick degradation of their initial efficiencies. Here, a new design scheme is presented to enhance the PSC stability by using low-temperature hydrothermally grown hierarchical nano-SnO2 electron transport layers (ETLs). The ETL contains a thin compact SnO2 layer underneath a mesoporous layer of SnO2 nanosheets. The mesoporous layer plays multiple roles of enhancing photon collection, preventing moisture penetration and improving the long-term stability. Through such simple approaches, PSCs with power conversion efficiencies of ≈13% can be readily obtained, with the highest efficiency to be 16.17%. A prototypical PSC preserves 90% of its initial efficiency even after storage in air at room temperature for 130 d without encapsulation. This study demonstrates that hierarchical SnO2 is a potential ETL for fabricating low-cost and efficient PSCs with long-term stability.