THE SCHOOL OF MATERIALS SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING

GEORGIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

Under the provisions of the regulations for the degree

MASTER OF SCIENCE

on Friday, April 19, 2019

3:30 PM
in Love 295

will be held the

MASTER’S THESIS DEFENSE

for

Jinho Hah

“Encapsulation and Design of Scalable Packaging Materials for Thin Film Perovskite Solar Cell Application”

Committee Members:

Prof. C. P. Wong, Advisor, MSE

Prof. Meilin Liu, MSE

Prof. Samuel Graham, ME

Abstract:

There have been many attempts to improve the stability of the environmentally-sensitive perovskite solar cells (PSCs) from adverse environments. The next generation encapsulation method should be compatible with roll-to-roll (R2R) processing, which can manufacture thin-film PSC modules at large scale and make solar electricity economically competitive with conventional electricity generation. This work investigates the interface chemistry between the polymer backsheet and the polymer encapsulants to understand the moisture, thermal, and UV stability of the packaging materials for PSCs. First, surface modification on the commercially available PET backsheets was done using various types of silane-based coupling agents, and their adhesion profiles were studied upon damp-heat exposure on these samples. Second, thorough XPS analysis was conducted on the delaminated PET surface from the PET/EVA/PET encapsulation architecture upon the UV, thermal, and moisture aging to understand the degradation mechanism at the interface. Moreover, this work also includes encapsulant design by combining the polymer blends to improve the mechanical and chemical bulk properties of a PV encapsulant. In short, this work serves to investigate on the encapsulation methods to improve the reliability and lifetime of PSCs.