An Empa team led by Frank Nüesch, Head of Empa's Functional Polymers Department, has been working in recent years on new manufacturing processes for perovskite solar cells in order to produce them not only faster but also cheaper. To this end, the researchers collaborated with Solaronix, a company based in western Switzerland, as part of a project of the Swiss Federal Office of Energy (SFOE). Together they produced a functional perovskite cell on a laboratory scale with a surface area of 10x10cm.
For the production of this novel perovskite cell, the so-called slot-die process is used. Here, the material layer is applied to a substrate of glass and then structured by removing excess material with a laser. "With the new coating process, we can not only coat faster, but also determine the thickness of the layers more flexibly," says Nüesch. In the future, the slot-die process will make it possible to coat meter-long webs relatively easily and quickly. The coating speed is then also the central element in a possible industrialization of perovskite cell production.
"With this new process we can 'print' seven times faster than with the previous screen printing method," explains Nüesch. The perovskite solar cell gets its final touch by applying the perovskite absorber by means of inkjet printing in Empa's "Coating Competence Center" - the so-called infiltration. Here the perovskite is no longer applied to the substrate as a solid layer, but seeps through all the porous layers of the solar cell down to the bottom.
In developing the new process, the Empa team worked closely with Solaronix experts. They are the source of the "inks" - nanoscale conductors, semiconductors and insulators - for printing the individual, wafer-thin layers of the solar cell.
The difficulty for the Empa researchers was to prepare this ink in such a way that it was suitable for the slot-die process. The various settings of the coating unit, such as the speed of the slot-die, the flow rate and the distance between the slot-die and the substrate, also had to be coordinated in order to achieve an optimum result. Now they have reportedly succeeded in doing just that.
A further advantage of the perovskite solar cells produced using this new process is a longer service life compared to previous perovskite cells. In a next step, field tests will follow: at the end of 2020, the perovskite solar cells will be mounted on the roof of the NEST building on the Empa campus in Dübendorf, where they will have to prove themselves in everyday use.