Kitchen-grade aluminium foil for substrate cum electrode for perovskite photovoltaics

Flexible and lightweight photovoltaics have attracted great attention in recent years owing to their application in wearable and portable electronic devices. However, the use of polymer substrates obstructs the fabrication of highly efficient and stable devices due to their limitations like low transmittance, poor temperature tolerance, photodegradation, high material cost, etc. In addition, conventional flexible transparent electrodes (TEs) such as indium tin oxide (ITO) deposited on polymeric substrates have poor electro-optical properties compared to their glass counterpart and are still brittle, which not only negatively affect the performance but also the flexibility/bendability. Here in this talk, I will discuss in detail utilizing a kitchen-grade aluminium foil providing a lightweight, low-cost, mechanically flexible substrate-cum-electrode, for the very first time, in fabricating perovskite solar cells. We achieved a high power per unit weight of over 3.5 W/g, much higher than conventional solar cells. The present work traces a way towards the fabrication of lightweight and flexible photovoltaic/optoelectronic devices by incorporation of metallic foil as substrate-cum-electrode.