Researchers at Yunnan University, the Southwest United Graduate School, the Fujian Institute of Research on the Structure of Matter (Chinese Academy of Sciences), and EPFL have demonstrated perovskite solar cells that operate submerged at depths of up to 10 meters, an application the team says extends underwater solar harvesting far beyond the shallow depths (2 m or less) explored in prior work. 

The schematic diagram of submerged perovskite solar cells for underwater applications. Credit: Simin Ma, Yunnan University

The devices were field-tested at 10 m depth off the Weizhou Islands in the South China Sea, where large-area modules generated 324 mWh of electricity over two hours of submerged illumination - enough to charge lithium-ion batteries and power LEDs.

Shandong Energy Group, a major Chinese state-owned energy conglomerate, showcased its in-house perovskite solar cell technology at a New Energy-themed edition of the "Qilu Manufacturing Salon" event on September 4, including a semi-transparent perovskite photovoltaic glass panel designed as a replacement for a car's panoramic sunroof. According to the company, retrofitting a typical family SUV's sunroof, roughly 1.2 to 1.7 square meters in area, with the perovskite glass could add about 30 kilometers of driving range per day under normal daylight.

Shandong Energy Group's perovskite photovoltaic glass on display at the Qilu Manufacturing Salon event, including a building-integrated (BIPV) demo panel mounted over a brick facade mockup. Image: Shandong Energy Perovskite / Perovskite Optical Chain via WeChat

The company describes the light-absorbing layer at the core of the cell as less than 1 micrometer thick, about 1/100th the diameter of a human hair, which it says allows the material to be manufactured either as a rigid sheet or bent and shaped into curved forms. Beyond automotive glass, Shandong Energy Group says the same technology can be integrated into building glass curtain walls and skylights, turning building facades into power-generating surfaces without compromising natural lighting or appearance.

Researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar and the Institut de Chimie Moléculaire de l'Université de Bourgogne (ICMUB) in Dijon, France, have shown that coating a lead-free halide perovskite ammonia sensor with a thin hydrophobic polymer layer substantially improves its reliability under humid conditions, addressing one of the main obstacles keeping perovskite-based gas sensors as lab curiosities rather than practical devices.

Halide perovskites are attractive for room-temperature chemiresistor gas sensors thanks to their high surface activity and easily tunable electronic structure, but their strong sensitivity to atmospheric moisture has been a persistent problem: adsorbed water perturbs the perovskite lattice, generates defects, and promotes ion migration, causing sensor readings to drift, show hysteresis between rising and falling gas concentrations, and lose reproducibility under realistic, humidity-varying conditions. Prior stabilization approaches, including compositional tuning and inorganic passivation layers, have generally either left residual humidity sensitivity in place or blocked gas access to the sensing material enough to hurt performance.

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Plasma-lit climatic, altitude and thermal-shock chambers that hold the full AM1.5G or AM0 spectrum, UVA + UVB (+ UVC), for the entire duration of the ageing run.

Perovskite research has changed its unit of measurement. Efficiency records still make headlines, but the numbers that now decide whether a device gets published, funded or flown are T80 lifetimes, retention after thousands of hours under continuous illumination, and the ISOS protocol used to get there.

That shift puts an uncomfortable amount of weight on a single instrument: the lamp.

The two blind spots in accelerated ageing

LED simulators stop where the interesting chemistry starts. They are stable, efficient and have become the default for light soaking. But below roughly 350 nm they have little to offer, and UVB and UVC are simply absent from the spectrum. Every degradation pathway driven by high-energy photons stays invisible for the whole test.

The Australian National University (ANU) has secured AU$7.1 million (about US$5.1 million) in funding from the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) toward a AU$19.2 million (about US$13.8 million) project to develop low-cost, parallel-connected perovskite-silicon tandem solar technology, working alongside partners UNSW, Macquarie University, the University of Queensland, Halocell Energy, Tindo Operations, and Greatcell Solar Materials.

The five-year project, running from August 2026 through August 2031, is funded through ARENA's Ultra Low-Cost Solar PV R&D round, which aims to help drive installed solar costs down to 30 cents per watt by 2030. ANU (as lead organization) and its partners plan to improve perovskite materials, manufacturing processes, and module design, test device reliability, and demonstrate larger-area tandem solar modules built around a parallel-connection architecture, which wires the perovskite and silicon subcells together in parallel rather than the more common series (two-terminal) tandem configuration. The team will also explore a retrofit pathway that would let flexible perovskite modules be added onto existing silicon PV systems already in the field, rather than requiring an entirely new tandem module to be manufactured and installed.

Researchers at Taizhou University in China, led by corresponding authors Yanxian Jin, Guiqiang Pu, and Jiacheng Wang of the Zhejiang Key Laboratory for Island Green Energy and New Materials, together with contributing researchers from the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the University at Buffalo, State University of New York, have developed a nickel-doping strategy for cesium lead bromide (CsPbBr₃) perovskite nanocrystals that simultaneously improves scintillation brightness and environmental stability, two properties that have historically traded off against each other in halide perovskite scintillator materials.

(a) Schematic illustration of the introduction of Ni²⁺ into the lattice of CsPbBr₃, effectively suppressing vacancy formation. (b) The effect of Ni²⁺ doping on defects and lattice in CsPbBr₃. The Ni²⁺ doping could remove the defects and shrink the lattice. (c) The satellite map of PLQY, LY, stability for both CsPbBr₃ and CsPbBr₃:Ni. Image from: Nano Research

Metal halide perovskites such as CsPbBr₃ are attracting growing interest as scintillators, materials that convert high-energy X-ray radiation into visible light for security screening, industrial inspection, and medical imaging, thanks to their high effective atomic number, strong optoelectronic performance, and low-cost solution processing relative to conventional inorganic scintillators like bismuth germanate (BGO) and CsI:Tl. Their practical deployment has been held back, though, by intrinsic structural instability and defect-driven nonradiative recombination that saps light output. Earlier metal-doping approaches using ions such as Mn²⁺ or Zn²⁺ have generally optimized only a single property at a time, and some, including Mn²⁺, introduce longer-lived luminescent centers that cause afterglow and blur continuous X-ray images.

In thin-film photovoltaics, the smallest details often decide the biggest outcomes. While the industry debates efficiency gains of tenths of a percent, many manufacturers overlook a more fundamental lever: the dead zone. These seemingly insignificant micrometers between cells can be worth millions in profit. Standard systems today operate with dead zones as wide as 160 µm. The LPKF Allegro series brings that down to 100 µm.

Laser scribing in a thin-film production line. Image: LPKF

Dead Zone vs. Active Area

The dead zone is the inactive area between individual cells in a thin-film or perovskite module. It exists because of the laser structuring steps P1, P2, and P3, required for electrical isolation and interconnection of the cells. Every micrometer of this "dead" area reduces the active, power-generating module area, and directly reduces efficiency and profitability along with it. A 160 µm dead zone is the conservative, safe approach many systems still take today. It may look safe but costs money every day of production.

Researchers at ITMO University, Alferov University and Harbin Engineering University have developed a new method for directly and accurately measuring the mechanical durability of individual halide perovskite nanoparticles, a property that is central to perovskite-based flexible electronics such as foldable displays, pressure sensors, and solar cells but has been difficult to measure reliably at the nanoscale.

Perovskite nanoparticles are attractive for flexible devices because they absorb and emit light efficiently, but they remain mechanically fragile: repeated bending or compression causes microcracks to accumulate, eventually causing devices to fail. Assessing how well a nanoparticle will hold up under real-world flexing requires measuring its Young's modulus, a quantity describing how strongly a material resists deformation, where a lower modulus generally means better suitability for foldable applications. Conventional methods measure this property with indentors, hard tips pressed into a sample, but even the smallest indentors are far larger than a single nanoparticle, making it effectively impossible to apply controlled, direct pressure to one nanocrystal with standard equipment.

Researchers at Sungkyunkwan University, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei University of Technology and Shaanxi Normal University have developed an interface engineering approach for perovskite solar cells that controls electron and hole transport by swapping a single heteroatom in an organic interlayer cation, rather than relying on chemical doping. The approach reached a power conversion efficiency of 27.61%, certified at a steady-state 27.19%, together with strong operational stability and scalability to large-area modules.

Carrier-selective interfaces, the layers that determine how efficiently electrons and holes are extracted toward their respective electrodes, are typically tuned in perovskite solar cells through extrinsic chemical doping. That approach has a known weakness: dopant species can migrate from their intended positions or react with surrounding materials over a device's operating lifetime, degrading the very carrier-selectivity they were added to create, and contributing to the shorter operational lifetimes that have held perovskite solar cells back relative to silicon.

Yanhe Technology has signed a strategic cooperation framework agreement with Beijing Dynaflow Lab Solution to build an AI-enabled research and development system for perovskite photovoltaics, combining Dynaflow's automated laboratory and high-throughput experimentation platforms with Yanhe's perovskite product design and mass-production expertise.

The partnership will focus on four areas: developing new perovskite material formulations, integrated "lights-out" laboratory solutions that can run experiments with minimal human intervention, AI for Science applications, and high-throughput experimentation for space photovoltaic materials. By pairing Dynaflow's AI-powered automated labs and intelligent data analysis with Yanhe's device solutions and power management technologies, the companies aim to shorten material screening and device optimization cycles while strengthening the link between R&D, validation, and manufacturing. The two sides also plan to explore customized AI lights-out laboratory setups for perovskite research, multi-scenario technology validation, and space photovoltaic applications.