Recent Perovskite News - Page 3

TNO, the Dutch applied research institute, is developing an ultra-thin perovskite solar film designed to be applied directly to the surface of caravans and motorhomes, with the aim of bringing it to market within about four years. The project is backed by close to €50 million in subsidies.

Many caravans and RVs already carry solar panels, but conventional panels add substantial weight - a real constraint given that these vehicles can easily exceed their maximum allowed weight. TNO's film is designed to avoid that penalty: because the perovskite solar cells are processed into a thin, flexible film, they can be applied directly to a vehicle's surface rather than mounted as a separate rigid panel. The goal is to let caravans and RVs run independently off-grid for longer, which the developers note is particularly useful for RVs operating away from campgrounds or established RV parks.

Betterial has introduced a thermoplastic (TPO) encapsulation film designed for the low-temperature lamination needs of perovskite modules, alongside new encapsulation solutions for back-contact (BC) and TOPCon modules and a UV-conversion film for high-UV deployment environments.

The perovskite-targeted film addresses a specific degradation risk: conventional crosslinked encapsulation films can generate halide residues that chemically corrode the perovskite layer. Betterial's halogen-free TPO formulation is designed to avoid that risk while still enabling low-temperature lamination and strong adhesion between module layers. The company offers two variants for perovskite modules - the B606L high-transmittance film and the B606LP UV-cutoff film - both rated for light transmittance of at least 85% between 380 nm and 1,100 nm and adhesion to glass of at least 80 N/cm. The two differ in UV handling: B606L allows at least 75% UV transmittance, while B606LP caps UV transmittance at 10% or less, for applications where blocking UV exposure matters more than passing it through.

Xingshu Plan (星枢计划) is a Shanghai-based space computing program led by Fudan University, which supplies the underlying space-based large-model technology, together with Xingshu Tiansuan Aerospace Technology, which leads the program's research, development and operations. The program aims to build a distributed network of computing satellites that provide on-demand computing services to sectors including energy, maritime and government.

During the recent World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) in Shanghai, the program unveiled its first "constellation" - a group of three linked satellites, launched together to work as a single coordinated unit. The group uses a "one main, two auxiliary" architecture: a central computing satellite, a "Fuxi" weather satellite carrying a microwave radiometer for all-weather atmospheric sensing, and an ultra-low-orbit remote-sensing satellite with its own onboard edge-computing capability. The three satellites are linked by inter-satellite laser communication, and the group is designed so that data collection, AI inference and analysis are all completed in orbit, without needing to downlink raw data to the ground. It's the central computing satellite in this first group that uses perovskite tandem solar cells to provide its power.

Researchers from Hebei University of Technology, the Changchun Institute of Optics, Fine Mechanics and Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the Chinese University of Hong Kong have developed a fabrication method for perovskite light-emitting diodes (PeLEDs) that works entirely in open air, lifting the photoluminescence quantum yield (PLQY) of the emissive film from 6% to 64% and yielding devices with a peak external quantum efficiency (EQE) of 10.5% and an operational lifetime of 125.6 minutes.

PeLEDs are attractive for next-generation displays and lighting thanks to their narrow emission linewidths, high color purity and solution processability, and devices spanning blue, green, red and near-infrared have already achieved EQEs above 20%. However, perovskite films are highly sensitive to atmospheric moisture and oxygen, which normally forces fabrication into tightly controlled inert atmospheres - adding cost and complexity that stands in the way of scaling the technology up commercially. One common workaround adds hydrophobic organic ammonium halides to the perovskite precursor, which induce quasi-2D structures that confine excitons and make the film more moisture-tolerant. But conventional versions of this approach, built on hydrophobic long-chain ligands, bring their own problems: the ligands' bulk widens the spacing between quantum wells in a way that hampers carrier injection and interlayer energy transfer, and ligand aggregation tends to produce an excess of low-n phases that introduce additional non-radiative recombination. Producing well-regulated quasi-2D films has also typically required precisely controlled antisolvent dripping using toxic, volatile solvents such as diethyl ether or chlorobenzene - a process sensitive to timing, solvent diffusion and humidity, giving a narrow processing window and poor reproducibility, especially in ambient conditions.

A new international project, POP-PV (Process Optimization & Production Readiness for Next Generation Solar PV Manufacturing), has launched under the 8th SMART Advanced Manufacturing Call, with national funding from Innovate UK and Vinnova. The consortium brings together Power Roll (UK), Dyenamo (Sweden) and the University of Sheffield (UK) to tackle the manufacturing and materials challenges still standing in the way of commercializing perovskite solar cells.

The project centers on advancing Power Roll's patented micro-groove solar film technology, an ultra-lightweight alternative to conventional silicon solar panels designed for commercial and industrial rooftops and building facades that current PV systems can't serve. Many warehouses, factories and commercial buildings remain unsuitable for conventional glass-panel PV due to structural load limits, installation complexity, performance issues or cost, and Power Roll's film is aimed at opening up that underused space to solar power generation.

TandemPV has installed one of its perovskite-silicon tandem panels atop UC Merced's Science and Engineering 2 Building for outdoor testing, installed alongside smaller Tandem PV test panels already in place, marking the start of a multi-month durability study run with UC Merced researchers.

The panel is built on Tandem PV's approach of integrating a perovskite layer into existing silicon solar manufacturing supply chains. A coating just one-hundredth the thickness of a human hair is meant to boost the panel's energy output from 24% to 30%, which the company says translates to about 30% more electricity from the same footprint compared with a typical silicon panel. Because labor and balance-of-system costs account for roughly 75% of utility-scale solar costs, generating more power per panel without a larger footprint helps bring down the overall cost of a solar installation.

Researchers from Nanjing University, JA Solar, Chongqing University, Jiangsu New Energy Development Co. and Jiangsu Guoxin Research Institute have designed a new self-assembled monolayer (SAM) additive molecule that fixes a longstanding defect problem at the buried hole-transport interface of inverted perovskite solar cells, enabling a wide-bandgap perovskite cell with a champion power conversion efficiency (PCE) of 23.7% and a perovskite/silicon tandem device that reaches 33.3% (certified at 33.1%), with no measurable PCE loss after 30 days of outdoor operation.

Device configuration illustration and chemical structures of Me and TTA. Image from: Science Advances

In inverted perovskite solar cells, the SAM sitting beneath the perovskite layer governs how well the perovskite crystallizes and how efficiently charge is extracted at that buried interface. The carbazole-based SAM molecule Me-4PACz is widely used for its strong hole-extraction properties, but it tends to self-aggregate when processed from alcoholic solvents, producing uneven coverage with island-like clusters and pinholes. That patchy coverage weakens binding to both the substrate below and the perovskite above, raises interface defect density, and impairs charge transport - a problem that has proven difficult to solve without sacrificing some other aspect of performance.

Researchers from Tsinghua University and Civil Aviation University of China have developed a perovskite laser cell-thermoelectric (PLC-TE) tandem device that converts an incoming green laser beam into electricity at a power conversion efficiency (PCE) of 38.49%, designed to be embedded in the wing of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) as an in-flight power source.

The work targets laser wireless power transmission (LWPT), an approach to beaming energy over long distances that offers strong directionality, flexible beam-steering and resistance to electromagnetic interference. For UAVs, whose flight time is fundamentally capped by onboard battery capacity, LWPT raises the possibility of a drone that recharges continuously in the air rather than returning to the ground. CsPbBr₃ perovskite is a strong candidate receiver material for this application: its broad bandgap absorbs efficiently across the blue-green range (400-550 nm) that aligns with atmospheric transmission windows, and the material remains stable under the high-temperature, high-energy-photon conditions a concentrated laser beam produces.

With just a few months to go until Perovskite Connect 2026, returning once again to Berlin for its second edition, we are revisiting some of the standout talks from the 2025 edition. These videos feature three companies working at the leading edge of commercializing perovskite and perovskite-silicon tandem solar panels. Each short clip runs one to two minutes and offers a taste of the full presentations delivered on stage in Berlin.

Oxford PV - Ed Crossland: "The Era of Perovskite-on-Silicon: Delivering Commercial 30%+ Modules to the Global Market"

Silicon solar is nearing its practical efficiency limit, and perovskite-silicon tandems are the technology poised to break through it. In this keynote, Oxford PV's Ed Crossland reflected on the company having shipped the world's first commercial perovskite-silicon tandem modules in 2024, and charted the roadmap toward higher efficiencies - with a particular emphasis on durability, scalability, and integrating perovskite cells into existing silicon manufacturing lines with minimal disruption.

Researchers from Taiwan's National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University and Flexwave have developed a self-adaptive interfacial nanostructure (SAIN) for the hole-extraction contacts of inverted perovskite solar cells, reporting a power conversion efficiency (PCE) approaching 20% under standard 1-sun illumination and 38.16% under indoor lighting at 2,000 lux - a figure that climbs above 40% once paired with an optical enhancement film, placing the device among the most efficient indoor perovskite solar cells reported to date.

The team explains that "regular" n-i-p configurations tend to reach higher efficiencies, but inverted PeSCs offer better long-term stability and are easier to stack into multijunction devices, making the p-i-n architecture an attractive target for further improvement. A major bottleneck in inverted PeSCs is the buried hole-transport layer (HTL) sitting beneath the perovskite film. Because the perovskite crystallizes directly on top of it, the HTL's quality shapes both the interface and the growing perovskite layer itself, and a poor HTL drives up non-radiative recombination - carriers lost to defects rather than converted into current, which shows up as low photoluminescence quantum yield in the finished film. Today's leading inverted devices typically grow their perovskite on either a hole-conducting polymer such as poly(triarylamine) (PTAA) or a self-assembled monolayer (SAM) built from carbazole-based molecules. Each has drawbacks: high-quality PTAA is costly to produce, while SAMs are difficult to deposit as a conformal, densely packed layer, which hurts device-to-device reproducibility. Both materials are also hydrophobic, complicating full-coverage perovskite deposition over large areas. Hybrid PTAA-plus-SAM contacts have been explored to combine their strengths, but so far only for standard 1-sun operation, leaving their potential for indoor photovoltaics untested.