Sharif Digital Repository

Interfacial studies and band alignment engineering on the electron transport layer (ETL) play a key role for fabrication of high-performance perovskite solar cells (PSCs). Here, an amorphous layer of SnO2 (a-SnO2) between the TiO2 ETL and the perovskite absorber is inserted and the charge transport properties of the device are studied. The double-layer structure of TiO2 compact layer (c-TiO2) and a-SnO2 ETL leads to modification of interface energetics, resulting in improved charge collection and decreased carrier recombination in PSCs. The optimized device based on a-SnO2/c-TiO2 ETL shows a maximum power conversion efficiency (PCE) of 21.4% as compared to 19.33% for c-TiO2 based device.... 

This paper presents solid-state ligand exchange of spin-coated colloidal lead sulfide quantum dot (PbS QD) films by methylammonium iodide (MAI) and integration of them in depleted heterojunction solar (DHS) devices having an antireflecting (AR) nanocone plastic structure. Time-resolved photoluminescence measurements determine a shorter lifetime of the charge carries on a semiconductor (TiO2) electron transfer layer for the MAI-passivated QD films as compared with those with long-chain aliphatic or short thiol ligands. Consequently, the DHS device yields improved power conversion efficiency (>125%) relative to oleic-acid-passivated PbS QD films. Using anodized aluminum oxide templates, an... 

The fabrication of efficient perovskite solar cells (PSCs) using all-vacuum processing is still challenging due to the limitations in the vacuum deposition of the hole transporting layer (HTL). Herein, inverted PSCs using copper (II) phthalocyanine (CuPC) as an ideal alternative HTL for vacuum processing are fabricated. After proper optimization, a PSC with a power conversion efficiency (PCE) of 20.3% is achieved, which is much better than the PCEs (16.8%) of devices with solution-based CuPC. As it takes a long time to dissolve CuPC in the solution-based device, the evaporation approach has better advantage in terms of fast processing. In addition, the device with the evaporated CuPC HTL... 

Stability is the main challenge in the field of perovskite solar cells (PSCs). Finding new strategies is required to protect the PSCs from deteriorating agents such as humidity, heating, and illumination. Herein, a new electron transporting layer (ETL), i.e., CdSe/ZnS quantum dots (QDs), is proposed for the fabrication of efficient and stable PSCs. CdSe/ZnS QDs layer not only works as an ETL but also has downshifting property, which can improve both efficiency and stability of the PSCs. Using CdSe/ZnS QDs ETL with green emission, a PSC with maximum power conversion efficiency (PCE) of 18% is achieved. More importantly, the device shows great UV stability, much better than the device with... 

The minimization of volume constrained vector-valued Ginzburg-Landau energy functional is considered in the present study. It has many applications in computational science and engineering, like the conservative phase separation in multiphase systems (such as the spinodal decomposition), phase coarsening in multiphase systems, color image segmentation and optimal space partitioning. A computationally efficient algorithm is presented to solve the space discretized form of the original optimization problem. The algorithm is based on the constrained nonmonotone L2 gradient flow of Ginzburg-Landau functional followed by a regularization step, which is resulted from the Tikhonov regularization... 

Coupled continuous quadratic knapsack problems (CCK) are introduced in the present study. The solution of a CCK problem is equivalent to the projection of an arbitrary point onto the volume constrained Gibbs N-simplex, which has a wide range of applications in computational science and engineering. Three algorithms have been developed in the present study to solve large scale CCK problems. According to the numerical experiments of this study, the computational costs of presented algorithms scale linearly with the problem size, when it is sufficiently large. Moreover, they show competitive or even superior computational performance compared to the advanced QP solvers. The ease of... 

An unconditionally energy stable time stepping scheme is introduced to solve Cahn-Morral-like equations in the present study. It is constructed based on the combination of David Eyre's time stepping scheme and Schur complement approach. Although the presented method is general and independent of the choice of homogeneous free energy density function term, logarithmic and polynomial energy functions are specifically considered in this paper. The method is applied to study the spinodal decomposition in multi-component systems and optimal space tiling problems. A penalization strategy is developed, in the case of later problem, to avoid trivial solutions. Extensive numerical experiments... 

An algorithm is proposed to optimize the performance of multiphase structures (composites) under elastodynamic loading conditions. The goal is to determine the distribution of material in the structure such that the time-averaged total stored energy of structure is minimized. A penalization strategy is suggested to avoid the checkerboard instability, simultaneously to generate near 0-1 topologies. As a result of this strategy, the solutions of presented algorithm are sufficiently smooth and possess the regularity of H1 function space. A simple method for the continuum adjoint sensitivity analysis of the corresponding PDE-constrained optimization problem is presented. It is general and can be... 

The regularity problem of heat conduction equation corresponding to modeling of solidification based on the latent heat evolution approach is considered in the present study. It is shown that the corresponding PDE is actually semi-smooth, an issue that has not been taken into account explicitly in the related literature. A general smoothing (regularization) strategy is introduced to solve this problem. More specifically, the smoothed version of the effective heat capacity method is presented in this work. The presented approach is applied to model the quasi steady-state heat transfer problem in the continuous casting process. Numerical experiments demonstrate the success of the presented... 

Thermal optimization of the vertical continuous casting process is considered in the present study. The goal is to find the optimal distribution of the temperature and interfacial heat transfer coefficients corresponding to the primary and secondary cooling systems, in addition to the pulling speed, such that the solidification along the main axis of strand approaches to the unidirectional solidification mode. Unlike many thermal optimization of phase change problems in which the desirable (target) temperature, temperature gradient, or interface position are assumed to be a priori known, a desirable shape feature of the freezing interface (not its explicit position) is assumed to be known in... 

An efficient and easy to implement method to generate Cartesian grids is presented. The presented method generates various kinds of Cartesian grids such as uniform, octree and embedded boundary grids. It supports the variation of grid size along each spatial direction as well as anisotropic and non-graded refinements. The efficiency and ease of implementation are the main benefits of the presented method in contrast to the alternative methods. Regarding octree grid generation, applying a simple and efficient data compression method permits to store all grid levels without considerable memory overhead. The presented method generates octree grids up to a 13-level refinement (81923 grids on the... 

The goal of the present study is to predict the formation of solidification induced defects in castings by thermal criteria functions. In a criterion function method, the heat transfer equation is firstly solved, and then the susceptibility of defect formation at every point in the casting is predicted by computing a local function, criterion function, using results of the thermal analysis. In the first part of the paper, some famous criteria functions, in particular, the Pellini and Niyama criteria, are analyzed and their shortcomings are discussed in details. Then, a new criterion function is suggested to decrease the shape-dependency issue of the former criteria. The feasibility of the... 

A new computational algorithm is introduced in the present study to solve multimaterial topology optimization problems. It is based on the penalization of the objective functional by the multiphase volume constrained Ginzburg-Landau energy functional. The update procedure is based on the gradient flow of the objective functional by a fractional step projected steepest descent method. In the first step, the new design is found based on the projected steepest descent method to ensure the reduction in the objective functional, simultaneously satisfying the control constraints. In the second step, regularization step, an H1 regularity of the solution is ensured while keeping the feasibility of... 

FAPbI3 perovskites are excellent candidates for fabrication of perovskite solar cells (PSCs) with high efficiency and stability. However, these perovskites exhibit phase instability problem at room temperature. In this work, to address this challenge we use methylammonium chloride (MACl) as an additive and employed a layer-by-layer thermal evaporation technique to fabricate high-quality perovskite films on a large scale of 25 cm2. The optimized perovskite films show high crystallinity with large grains in the μm-range and reveals phase stability due to the presence of MACl after the annealing process. Finally, we achieved PSCs with 17.7% and 15.9% for active areas of 0.1 cm2 and 0.8 cm2,... 

Herein, a new dopant-free organic material, PV2000, as a stable hole transporting layer (HTL) for the fabrication of stable and efficient perovskite solar cells (PSCs) is introduced. For this purpose, planar PSCs using a triple-A cation perovskite composition are fabricated and the commonly used 2,2′,7,7′-tetrakis[N,N-di(4-methoxyphenyl)amino]-9,9′-spirobifluorene (spiro-OMeTAD) HTL is replaced by dopant-free PV2000 polymer. The characterization results disclose that the PV2000 has a great thermal stability, good hole mobility, and suitable band alignment that matches well with the valence band of triple-A cation perovskite. After proper optimization of PV2000 film thickness, a planar PSC... 

Solution-processed quantum dots (QDs) have attracted significant attention for the low-cost fabrication of optoelectronic devices. Here, we synthesized PbS QDs via hot injection method and passivated the trap states by using short thiols and dopant elements for photovoltaic application. In order to study the effect of dopants on photovoltaic application, PbS QDs were doped by using three different cations: Cadmium, Calcium, and Zinc. We utilized Time resolvel Photoluminescence measurement to study the carriers lifetime for different samples and found that the carriers life time increases ∼80% by using Cd as a dopant compared with undoped sample. In addition, the results of J-V measurement... 

Herein, a simple and novel method was used to synthesize a new structure of graphene which can be called hollow graphene. First, the ZnO-Graphene QDs synthesized by solution method and then ZnO QDs were dissolved from this structure using an acidic solution to obtain hollow structure of graphene. Afterward, this structure was used in PbS QDs solar cell in order to improve the transport of electron and decrease the recombination of the carriers. A power conversion efficiency of 5.3% was obtained using hollow graphene as a fast electron extraction layer due to the enhancement of EQE and current density. The improvement of PCE in this device was corresponded to efficient photosensitized... 

In this paper, a hierarchical method for trajectory design for cooperative combat missions (CCM) is presented. In a military environment, in addition to physical constraints (aircraft dynamics and mountains) there are threats made by Radars or Artillery. So an important constraint, "Avoid Threats", is added to physical constraints. Major steps in trajectory design are: "Target Assignment", "Path Planning", "Path Smoothing and Trajectory Design". The most important points and a brief algorithm for each step is presented in this paper. Finally the method is applied to special case and the results presented. ©2008 IEEE  

PbS quantum dots (QDs) have been extensively studied for photovoltaic applications, thanks to their facile and low-cost fabrication processing and interesting physical properties such as size dependent and tunable band gap. However, the performance of PbS QD-based solar cells is highly sensitive to the humidity level in the ambient air, which is a serious obstacle toward its practical applications. Although it has been previously revealed that oxygen doping of the hole transporting layer can mitigate the cause of this issue, the suggested methods to recover the device performance are time-consuming and relatively costly. Here, we report a low-power oxygen plasma treatment as a rapid and...