**Angel A. Juan**

Angel A. Juan is a Full Professor of Data Science and Operations Research at the Universitat Politecnica de Val ` encia and Invited Professor at University College Dublin. Dr. Juan holds a Ph.D. ` in Industrial Engineering/Applied Mathematics, an M.S. in Information Systems & Technology, and an M.S. and B.Sc. in Mathematics. He completed a predoctoral internship at Harvard University and has been a Visiting Researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Georgia Institute of Technology, among others.

His main research interests include applications of Data Analytics, Optimization, Simulation, and Artificial Intelligence in Computational Transportation and Logistics, Production and Manufacturing, Computational Finance and Insurance, and Smart Cities. He has published over 150 articles in JCR-indexed journals and more than 325 documents indexed in Scopus. Dr. Juan is or has been Principal Investigator of several R&D projects.

Dr. Juan is one of the founders of the Decision Science Alliance. He is a member of the Mathematics/Business Expert Panels of the Flanders Research Foundation (FWO) and the Agencia Andaluza del Conocimiento (AAC). He has been a Council Member of the INFORMS i-Sim society as well as an Executive Council member of the Spanish Society of Statistics and Operations Research (SEIO).

**Marwa. S. Salem 1,2, Ahmed Shaker 3,\*, Abdelhalim Zekry 4, Mohamed Abouelatta 4, Adwan Alanazi 5, Mohammad T. Alshammari <sup>5</sup> and Christian Gontand 6,7**


**Abstract:** In this work, we report on the effect of substituting the active intrinsic i-layer on a conventional pin structure of lead-free perovskite solar cell (PSC) by a homo p-n junction, keeping the thickness of the active layer constant. It is expected that when the active i-layer is substituted by a p-n homo junction, one can increase the collection efficiency of the photo-generated electrons and holes due to the built-in electric field of the homo junction. The impact of the technological and physical device parameters on the performance parameters of the solar cell have been worked out. It was found that p-side thickness must be wider than the n-side, while its acceptor concentration should be slightly lower than the donor concentration of the n-side to achieve maximum efficiency. In addition, different absorber types, namely, i-absorber, n-absorber and p-absorber, are compared to the proposed pn-absorber, showing a performance-boosting effect when using the latter. Moreover, the proposed structure is made without a hole transport layer (HTL) to avoid the organic issues of the HTL materials. The back metal work function, bulk trap density and ETL material are optimized for best performance of the HTL-free structure, giving *Jsc* = 26.48, *Voc* = 0.948 V, *FF* = 77.20 and PCE = 19.37% for AM1.5 solar spectra. Such results highlight the prospective of the proposed structure and emphasize the importance of using HTL-free solar cells without deteriorating the efficiency. The solar cell is investigated by using SCAPS simulator.

**Keywords:** lead-free; perovskite solar cell; homo p-n junction; HTL-free cells; SCAPS simulator
