Sofab Inks has announced that its nanoparticle inks have been used to produce 2 m × 1 m modules on a full-scale manufacturing line, with efficiency and stability that outperformed control devices. The company said the result shows its materials maintain their performance in a commercial manufacturing environment, and that additional production runs are already underway.

Sofab is also developing an inkjet-compatible formulation of its nanoparticle materials together with ink maker SAKATA INX, giving manufacturers another way to deposit them. The companies will share more about the ink at Perovskite Connect, taking place in Berlin on October 21-22, where Sofab and APS will also be exhibiting.

Researchers at UNSW Sydney, working with UtmoLight, have achieved a certified stabilized power conversion efficiency of 23.5% for a 30 × 30 cm perovskite solar submodule with an aperture area of 676 cm², which the university describes as a world record for large-area perovskite submodules. The result beats the previous benchmark by 0.6 percentage points and narrows the gap between large submodules and small laboratory cells, which typically measure around 1 cm². The release does not name the certifying body.

A large-scale perovskite solar submodule. Credit: Zhen Li/UNSW

The team, led by Scientia Professor Xiaojing Hao of UNSW's School of Photovoltaic and Renewable Energy Engineering and including Dr Zhen Li and Dr Ziyue Feng, reached the record while eliminating the nickel oxide layer commonly used in perovskite solar cells, particularly submodules, to help prevent electrical short circuits. Nickel oxide can react adversely with the perovskite material, adding to instability, and its deposition adds a manufacturing step. Using materials innovation and a different approach to fabricating the cell, the researchers removed the need for the layer, with a hole-selective contact forming directly during fabrication instead of through a conventional layer-by-layer process.

An Australian drone fitted with an ultra-lightweight perovskite solar array from Halocell Energy has completed an endurance flight of almost two hours and more than 75 kilometers. The Pegasus drone, developed by V-Tol Aerospace, also carried a single 382 Wh lithium-sulfur battery pack from Li-S Energy, and landed safely with battery capacity remaining.

The Pegasus in flight over Queensland, with the Halocell perovskite solar arrays visible along the wings. 

Li-S Energy said the pack, built with 1.1 kg of lithium-sulfur cells, delivered 80% more range and flight time than equivalent lithium polymer UAV batteries on the same cell-weight basis. The project was supported by a A$1.35 million (about US$941,000) grant from the Australian government's Emerging Aviation Technology Partnerships (EATP) program, matched by the collaboration partners. 

A recent review by researchers at the Academy of Maritime Education and Training (AMET) Deemed University in Chennai, India, surveys the growing body of research on organic-inorganic halide perovskites as electrode materials for lithium-ion batteries, arguing that the same tunable crystal structure behind perovskite solar cells also makes these materials unusually promising candidates for battery anodes.

For battery anodes, which must repeatedly absorb and release lithium ions as a cell charges and discharges, the review highlights that this same tunability gives halide perovskites an open, deformable lattice able to host large amounts of lithium, long carrier diffusion lengths for efficient charge transport, and fast ionic conductivity suited to high-rate operation. The standout figure cited in the review: lead-based halide perovskite anodes paired with lithium metal cathodes have reached initial discharge capacities around 1,600 mAh/g, well above the roughly 372 mAh/g theoretical capacity of the graphite anodes used in today's commercial lithium-ion cells.

Perovskite Connect 2026 is just two weeks away! The event, co-organized by Metalgrass and TechBlick, takes place on October 21-22 at the Estrel Convention Center in Berlin, with optional tours and masterclasses on October 20.

The conference covers the full perovskite value chain in one place: materials, inks and quantum dots; printing and solution processing; production and scale-up; testing and measurement; applications in photovoltaics, LEDs, displays and sensors; and market analysis and forecasts. Co-located with TechBlick's Future of Electronics RESHAPED event, it is expected to bring together over 600 participants, 80 exhibitors and 70 talks across both events.

Researchers at Institute of Science Tokyo have shown that the direction of a light-driven photocurrent in two-dimensional organic–inorganic hybrid perovskite (2D-OIHP) crystals is governed by the crystal's bulk polarity, and that this direction can be deterministically reversed by swapping the handedness of the organic molecules built into the crystal structure. The work was led by Professor Kouji Taniguchi and Assistant Professor Po-Jung Huang, with graduate student Ichi Naruse, in the university's Department of Chemistry.

The team worked with 2D-OIHP crystals made of alternating lead iodide layers and organic ammonium cation layers - a structure where the lead atoms provide strong spin–orbit coupling and the organic cations' permanent electric dipoles give the crystal a built-in, spontaneous polarity. Shining circularly polarized light on these crystals produces a circular photogalvanic effect (CPGE): a photocurrent whose direction flips depending on whether the light is left- or right-handed. Until now, it has been difficult to tell whether such currents originate from the bulk of the crystal or from its surface, since optical measurements probe both regions at once.

Researchers at Hellenic Mediterranean University (HMU), the HMU Research Center's Institute of Emerging Technologies (i-EMERGE), the Foundation for Research and Technology's Institute of Electronic Structure and Laser (FORTH-IESL), and the University of Crete report the first perovskite solar cells built with a spray-coated, laser-reduced graphene oxide (LrGO) layer in place of indium tin oxide (ITO) as the transparent conductive electrode.

ITO remains the standard transparent electrode for perovskite solar cells, but it's expensive, brittle, and resource-limited, and most prior graphene-based alternatives relied on CVD-grown graphene that then needs to be transferred onto glass, adding cost and complexity. Here, the team instead spray-coated graphene oxide directly onto glass and used an ultrashort-pulse infrared laser to reduce and pattern it into a conductive electrode, reaching about 400 Ω per square sheet resistance at 38% transmittance.

Researchers at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) have achieved a preliminary power conversion efficiency (PCE) of 24.5% in perovskite solar cells using Tinfab, the tin oxide nanoparticle ink from Sofab Inks.

The work was carried out by Professor De Wolf's group at the KAUST Solar Center, which is well known in perovskite and tandem photovoltaics. This group was the first to achieve a certified efficiency >33% for perovskite/silicon tandems and a certified 31.2% blade-coated tandem. The group has also studied the limits of fullerene electron transport layers, including how repeated evaporation of C60 source material degrades device performance.

Researchers at Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH), Soongsil University and Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology (GIST) have developed a way to add polarity to perovskite oxide thin films without disturbing their existing electronic properties, enabling diode-like, direction-dependent behavior in materials that remain metallic or superconducting. 

Polarity - a separation between positive and negative charge centers that gives a material directional electrical behavior - normally conflicts with properties like metallicity, magnetism and superconductivity, since each favors a different crystal structure. Conventional approaches that introduce polarity by changing a material's atomic composition tend to degrade the properties already present. The team instead developed a "selective atomic gradient" strategy that leaves the total atomic composition unchanged and only varies the stacking sequence, layer by layer. Working with perovskite oxides containing two metal sites - the corner "A sites," which set the lattice size, and the central "B sites," which govern electron transport - the researchers gradually shifted the ratio of large-to-small atoms occupying the A sites from the bottom to the top of the film. The resulting lattice strain displaces the B-site atoms slightly in one direction, inducing bulk polarity that is absent in uniformly mixed films.

Researchers at Italy's Institute for Microelectronics and Microsystems, part of the National Research Council (IMM-CNR), working with colleagues at the National Research Council's Institute of BioEconomy (IBE-CNR), have developed a semi-transparent perovskite solar cell architecture designed to deliver more naturally balanced light to crops grown underneath, for agrivoltaic applications. The work builds on the same team's earlier study showing that a CsPbI₃ perovskite rooftop could support healthy radicchio seedling growth in a lab-scale greenhouse, extending that direction from transparency alone to actively managing the spectral quality of the transmitted light.

Conventional perovskite films absorb blue light more strongly than red, so a continuous semi-transparent perovskite layer lets through light that's skewed toward red and near-infrared wavelengths, light that can hurt processes like chlorophyll synthesis and stomatal regulation. To avoid this, the team deposited the perovskite (AVA-MAPbI₃) as discrete, isolated micrometer-scale islands rather than a continuous film, grown through a one-step, antisolvent-free process directly onto a mesoporous titanium dioxide (TiO₂) scaffold. Each island forms a "cap" of perovskite above the surface with "roots" infiltrated into the porous TiO₂ beneath it, maintaining an extended interface for charge extraction while leaving the uncovered regions between islands open for light to pass through largely unfiltered.