title: Synthesis and Functionalisation of Two-Dimensional Materials for Energy Applications
Creators: name: Myagmarsereejid, Purevlkham
Publisher: name: Griffith University
Year: 2024
Subjects: subject: solar cells
subject: perovskite
subject: 2D materials
subject: Sb2S3

description: Developing clean energy that is readily accessible and deployable is essential in order to decouple from fossil fuels, which is one of the major contributors to global warming. Unlike fossil fuels, the sun is an inexhaustible energy source that can deliver more energy to the earth in one hour than the entire planet consumes in one year. The past two decades have seen extensive efforts to explore and investigate new types of solar cells with excellent progress made in the development of emerging photovoltaic (PV) cells. Antimony sulfide (Sb2S3) is an attractive solar absorber material that has garnered tremendous interest because of its fascinating properties for solar cells including excellent stability, suitable band gap, high absorption coefficient, earth abundance and environmentally benign characteristics. Despite the great advancements made in recent years, the record PCE (8%) of Sb2S3 solar cells still lags far behind the target PV performance (&gt;20%) for possible commercialization of this cutting-edge PV system. The most challenging issues obstructing PV performance of Sb2S3 solar cells include the poor carrier transport and significant charge recombination. Over the past several years, two-dimensional (2D) materials, many of which have attractive properties and unique structures, have emerged as promising candidates for improving the PV performances of emerging solar cells including perovskite solar cells (PSCs) and organic solar cells (OSC). However, there has been no effort integrating 2D materials into Sb2S3 solar cells. Meanwhile, PSCs have shown remarkable advancement in the past two decades with rapid increases in their power conversion efficiency (PCEs) from 3.8% in 2009 to more than 26% today. To translate this emerging PV technology from laboratory to market, the perovskite modules must be operationally stable for long-term in harsh environment (e.g. under moisture and thermal (85 °C) conditions), which however is the key challenge for PSCs at present. In addition, since PSCs use some high-cost electrode materials (gold (Au) and Spiro-OMeTAD), lowering the production cost of PSCs by replacing these expensive materials with low-cost materials is of great interest. Over the past several years, 2D materials with their unique combination of properties such as such as graphene derivatives, transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) and elemental 2D materials have been intensively studied in various applications for PSCs owing to their remarkable optoelectronic, chemical, and physical properties. Despite the excellent progress, research into the potential applications of novel 2D materials in PSCs is still at an early stage and much work remains to be done. This Ph.D. thesis is centered on the design and development of novel types of 2D materials for use in emerging PV cell applications namely, Sb2S3 and perovskite solar cells. This thesis is composed of seven chapters. After a brief introduction (Chapter 1), Chapter 2 presents an overview (literature review) of Sb2S3 and perovskite solar cells. The original research included in this thesis (Chapter 3, 4, 5 and 6) is provided below. [...]