Impact of Pressure and Temperature on the Compaction Dynamics and Layer Properties of Powder-Pressed Methylammonium Lead Halide Thick Films

While halide perovskite X-ray detectors based on single crystals could achieve extraordinary sensitivities, detectors based on polycrystalline thick films lag behind in efficiency. This is unfortunate since the processing methods for producing polycrystalline thick films, especially by pressure treatment of powders, are suitable for upscaling. Here, we investigate in detail the pressing of readily prepared powders of methylammonium lead halide perovskites MAPbI3 and MAPbBr3 to thick layers. By time-dependent pressure measurements, we monitor the occurring compaction dynamics, identifying two relaxation processes with different timescales. When pressing at elevated temperatures from room temperature (RT) to 100 °C, the pressure relaxations change drastically. While the layer properties such as relative density and surface roughness only improve to a certain degree by increasing the pressure at RT, we observe relative densities >97%, considerable reduction in surface roughness, and a significant increase in grain size with tempered pressing. Analyses regarding time-dependent pressure relaxations of tempered pressing allow attributing the dynamics to a sintering process, where we find the sinter onset to be surprisingly low at about 30 °C, mainly independent of the applied pressure (10–100 MPa). Our results will allow for an improved and more targeted powder processing of halide perovskite thick films as they are promising candidates for efficient X-ray detectors.