June 2022

Tokyo Chemical Industry (TCI) is a global supplier of laboratory chemicals and specialty materials. TCI is a leading the next-generation solar technology industry by providing high-quality and reliable materials, including metal halide perovskite precursors such as lead/tin halides and organic onium salts, as well as carrier transporting materials.

TCI recently launched hole selective self-assemble monolayer (SAM) forming agents, 2PACz [Product Number: C3663] , MeO-2PACz [Product Number: D5798] and Me-4PACz [Product Number: M3359] for high performance perovskite solar cells. The company is getting ready to launch some more related materials in 2022. We thought it'd be a good time to catch up with TCI, and have conducted a Q&A with TCI’s Institute for Material Science's general manager, Dr. Taro Tanabe.

University of Surrey researchers have produced solar cell building blocks out of perovskite ink. Current inks do not guarantee seamless transitions on an industrial scale, as the manufacturing process needs to be highly controlled and optimized. That is why the team developed a perovskite ink that presents a fast and reproducible way to fabricate these solar cell building blocks on a mass scale. 

Korea-based Hanwha Solutions has announced that it has come one step closer to mass-producing perovskite solar cells. Hanwha Q CELLS, the solar power business division of Hanwha Solutions, recently succeeded in developing a 6-inch solar tandem cell. 

Hanwha Solutions has reportedly overcome the disadvantages of small area cells, which were a constraint on mass production of perovskite batteries, paving the way for mass production of next-generation solar cells. The company is currently working on performance improvement of the solar tandem cell, with the goal of beginning mass production of perovskite batteries in 2025. Hanwha Q CELLS said it is preparing for mass production of the tandem cells.

Researchers at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) and Max Planck Institute have developed an inverted perovskite-silicon tandem solar cell with a 1 nm thick interlayer based on magnesium fluoride (MgFx) placed between the perovskite layer and the hole transport layer (HTL), in order to reduce voltage losses while still retaining 95.4% of its initial efficiency after 1,000 hours.

The scientists stated that the charge transport and recombination interfaces could be carefully tuned with MgFx interlayers, enabling a certified efficiency of 29.3%. Currently, the record perovskite/silicon tandem solar cell is a 29.8% device that was recently developed by scientists at Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin (HZB) in Germany. The scientists fabricated the new cell with a sub-cell based on crystalline silicon wafers with double-side texture, which they say reduces front reflection while improving light trapping. They also placed the MgFx interlayer at the electron-selective top contact.

An international group of researchers from Swansea University, Indian Institute of Technology, University of Jammu, CSIR and Khalifa University of Science and Technology recently examined how down-conversion (DC) materials could be used to improve the performance of solar cells based on perovskite materials. The team reported that such materials could result in an electric yield enlargement by converting ultraviolet (UV) light to visible, while also providing UV shielding.

“The DC materials can absorb the high-energy photon (300–500 nm) and re-emit a longer-wavelength photon to which the photovoltaic (PV) device is more sensitive,” the team said. “Various types of DC materials have been investigated for this purpose like quantum dots (QDs), oxides, luminescent glasses, lanthanides, and organic dyes.”

A multi-institutional team, including the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DoE) Argonne National Laboratory, has developed a perovskite-based approach with which computer chips can be designed to learn to reconfigure their circuits when presented with new information. It does so by mimicking functions in the human brain with so-called ​“neuromorphic” circuits and computer architecture. 

“Human brains can actually change as a result of learning new things,” said Subramanian Sankaranarayanan, a paper co-author with a joint appointment at Argonne and the University of Illinois Chicago. ​“We have now created a device for machines to reconfigure their circuits in a brain-like way.”

An international research group, including teams from CHOSE at the University of Rome Tor Vergata, Hellenic Mediterranean University in Greece and others, has developed a large-area perovskite solar panel with graphene-doped electron transporting layers (ETLs) and functionalized molybdenum disulfide (fMoS₂) buffer layers inserted between the perovskite layer and the hole transporting layer (HTL).

The team reported that with increasing temperatures, the module exhibited a smaller drop in open-circuit voltage than commercially available crystalline silicon panels.

University of Cambridge scientists have created two automatically generated databases presenting photovoltaic properties and device material data for dye-sensitized solar cells (DSCs) and perovskite solar cells (PSCs).

The scientists used the ChemDataExtractor text-mining toolkit, which they described as a “chemistry-aware” natural-language-processing (NLP) tool. It was applied to 25,720 scientific articles comprising 660,881 data entries representing 57,678 photovoltaic devices. The database for the dye-sensitized devices included 475,045 entries organized into 41,680 records. The one for perovskite cells included 185,836 entries organized into 15,818 records.

The CEA at INES has reported the design of flexible perovskite solar modules with a surface area of 11.6 cm² and a power conversion efficiency of 18.9% (stabilized efficiency > 18.5%). This performance is said to be a world record for flexible perovskite modules over 10 cm².

Perovskite-based modules before and after flexible encapsulation. Image credit: CEA

For some applications, the use of flexible substrates may be attractive for single-junction perovskite technology as it opens the way to high-speed, low-temperature printing processes. Thus, it becomes possible to use low cost substrates whereas inorganic flexible technologies, such as CIGS, require higher temperature processes and substrates that are more expensive. Many teams around the world are trying to meet the challenges of making larger area devices with sufficient stability for real-life applications. This is one of the tasks standing before partners of the European APOLO project, as part of which these results were obtained.

China-based equipment maker, SC SOLAR, has launched new cluster-type evaporation equipment specially suited for perovskite solar cells.

SC SOLAR has been working towards establishing an intelligent equipment manufacturing center, located in Suzhou. It is meant for assembling high-end photovoltaic module production lines and also for establishing an R&D center for heterojunction and perovskite tandem cells development.