Evaluation of the resistance of halide perovskite solar cells to high energy proton irradiation for space applications

Hybrid perovskite solar cells have been under the radar of research efforts worldwide in the recent years. In particular, halide perovskite solar cells are of great interest for space applications due to their high efficiencies, low cost and extremely low weight. A few reports have shown good tolerance of the perovskite solar cells to high energy proton irradiation that adds interest for their space use. In this work, we explore the endurance of typical mesoscopic n-i-p MAPbI ₃ solar cells in LEO (low earth orbit) conditions. We observe no measurable damage to the J-V performance for 10 MeV protons by in-situ measurements for the cells containing Spiro-OMeTAD as the hole transporting material (HTL). However, when P3HT is employed as the HTL, we observe a healing effect and the efficiency improves after irradiation. For the Spiro-OMeTAD case, we do observe degradation of the performance by lowering the proton energies to 5 and 1 MeV as expected due to the increased number of collisions. Numerical simulation by wxAMPS software allows to understand the origin of the damage for the studied architecture solar cells under 5 and 1 MeV.