A team of researchers at Stanford University has used an insect-inspired design to protect perovskite materials for solar cells from deteriorating when exposed to heat, moisture or mechanical stress.
"We were inspired by the compound eye of the fly, which consists of hundreds of tiny segmented eyes," explained a professor of materials science and engineering at Stanford and senior author of a study. "It has a beautiful honeycomb shape with built-in redundancy: If you lose one segment, hundreds of others will operate. Each segment is very fragile, but it's shielded by a scaffold wall around it."
"The scaffold is made of an inexpensive epoxy resin widely used in the microelectronics industry," a co-lead author of the study said. "It's resilient to mechanical stresses and thus far more resistant to fracture."
Tests revealed that the scaffolding had little effect on how efficiently perovskite converted light into electricity.
In addition, to test against extreme conditions, the researchers exposed encapsulated perovskite cells to temperatures of 185 degrees Fahrenheit, or 85 degrees Celsius, and 85% relative humidity for six weeks, only to find that the cells continued to generate electricity at relatively high rates of efficiency.