Bimodal Porosity and Stability of a TiO₂ Gig-Lox Sponge Infiltrated with Methyl-Ammonium Lead Iodide Perovskite.

ABSTRACT: We created a blend between a TiO₂ sponge with bimodal porosity and a Methyl-Ammonium Lead Iodide (MAPbI₃) perovskite. The interpenetration of the two materials is effective thanks to the peculiar sponge structure. During the early stages of the growth of the TiO₂ sponge, the formation of 5-10 nm-large TiO₂ auto-seeds is observed which set the micro-porosity (<5 nm) of the layer, maintained during further growth. In a second stage, the auto-seeds aggregate into hundreds-of-nm-large meso-structures by their mutual shadowing of the grazing Ti flux for local oxidation. This process generates meso-pores (10-100 nm) treading across the growing layer, as accessed by tomographic synchrotron radiation coherent X-ray imaging and environmental ellipsometric porosimetry. The distributions of pore size are extracted before (>47% V) and after MAPbI₃ loading, and after blend ageing, unfolding a starting pore filling above 80% in volume. The degradation of the perovskite in the blend follows a standard path towards PbI₂ accompanied by the concomitant release of volatile species, with an activation energy of 0.87 eV under humid air. The use of dry nitrogen as environmental condition has a positive impact in increasing this energy by ~0.1 eV that extends the half-life of the material to 7 months under continuous operation at 60 °C.

SUBMITTER: Sanzaro S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6781015 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature