Renewables investor Magnora AG recently announced that it will increase its investment in perovskite solar developer Evolar, taking a 40.7% stake in the company.

Mats Ljunggren, Evolar's chief executive, said the company's next-generation solar cells have 'Much higher efficiency for about the same per-watt manufacturing cost' as traditional technologies.

Scientists from Pennsylvania State University, Shaanxi Normal University, Hubei University and the US Army Combat Capabilities Development Command have designed a semi-transparent perovskite solar cell that reached 19.8%, and 28.3% in a tandem cell stacked on top of a silicon-heterojunction device. The device is based on a film of gold just a few atoms thick, grown using an innovative seeding method, which is both highly conductive and transparent.

The team investigated, in their new study, a new method to grow a very thin, continuous layer of gold onto a perovskite solar cell as the top electrode layer. Despite the fact that gold is a rare and expensive material, the group is convinced its approach offers an alternate, efficient route to fabricating perovskite and tandem solar cells.

Researchers from the University of Cambridge, University of Liverpool, CNRS, Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science and Diamond Light Source have shown the by melting and quenching hybrid organic'inorganic perovskite compounds, it is possible to create a new family of glasses that could find uses in the energy sector.

Comparison of physical properties of melt-quenched glasses with various materials. Image from study

The research team made three hybrid organic'inorganic perovskite compounds based on tetrapropylammonium with manganese(II), iron(II) and cobalt(II) and melted them. According to author François-Xavier Coudert at the CNRS in France, they had to tune the temperature to aim for a very narrow temperature window, around 20 degrees on average, depending on each metal used ' hot enough to liquefy the samples, but not so hot that it decomposes them. The team measured the exact heat coming in and out of the glasses to learn their properties, describing each one thoroughly. 'We're melting a novel class of materials and accessing a novel family of glasses,' Coudert says. 'I've probably never seen materials so well characterized with so many techniques and so much information. It is fascinating to see all of these methods together.'

Researchers at the University of Sheffield have found that storing perovskite precursor solutions at low temperatures extends their operational lifetime from under a month to over four months.

Understanding how to make perovskite solutions more durable and reliable could potentially make the manufacture of perovskite solar cells more efficient, as the process would require fewer batches of more stable material to be produced, saving time, reducing material waste and also allowing device yield and efficiency to be optimized.

Semiconductors that can exploit the omnipresent visible spectrum of light for different technological applications are highly sought after, but such semiconductors are often dexpensive and toxic. A group of scientists from Tokyo Institute of Technology and Kyushu University have collaborated to develop a low-cost and non-toxic narrow-gap semiconductor material with potential 'light-based' or photofunctional applications.

Tin-containing oxide semiconductors are cheaper than most semiconductor materials, but their photofunctional applications are constrained by a wide optical band gap. The team of scientists, led by Dr. Kazuhiko Maeda, Associate Professor at the Department of Chemistry, Tokyo Institute of Technology, developed a perovskite-based semiconductor material that is free of toxic lead and can absorb a wide range of visible light.

The following is a sponsored post by TCI

Tokyo Chemical Industry Company Limited (TCI) is now offering new hole selective self-assembled monolayer (SAM) forming agents, 2PACz [C3663], MeO-2PACz [D5798] and Me-4PACz [M3359] for high performance perovskite solar cells and OPVs.

The new materials enable efficient, versatile and stable p-i-n perovskite solar cell devices. These materials are useful for tandem solar cells as they grant conformal coverage on rough textures. In fact, a perovskite solar cell that uses the SAM hole transport layer can realize more than 20% efficiency without using dopants or additives. Perovskite-Silicon tandem solar cells that use Me-4PACz as a hole contact material realized 29.15% efficiency. Costs are lowered thanks to extremely low material consumption, and the processing is very simple and scalable.