Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have demonstrated a novel approach aimed at addressing perovskite’s durability problem: encasing the perovskite inside a double-layer protection system made from plastic and silica.
The research team developed a multi-step process to produce encased perovskite nanocrystals that exhibit strong resistance to degradation in moist environments.
Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have improved a transparent and conductive coating material by increasing its electrical conductivity by 10 times. When this coating material was integrated into a perovskite solar cell, it boosted the stability and efficiency of the solar cell.
“The goal is to find a material that is electrically conductive as well as transparent,” explained the team, which would be ‘“useful in a range of applications, including touch screens and solar cells.”
Researchers at Japan's OIST, in collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh in the U.S., have characterized the structural defects that prompt the movement of ions, destabilizing perovskite materials. The researchers' findings may help optimize perovskite solar cells.
This image of a perovskite surface shows the shifting of ions across the surface, and the vacancies causing these movements. Image by OIST
"For a long time, scientists have known structural defects exist, but didn't understand their precise chemical nature," said Collin Stecker, an OIST Ph.D. student and the first author of the study. "Our study delves into fundamental characteristics of perovskite materials to help device engineers further improve them."
An international research team that included scientists from the University of Exeter, in the U.K., Switzerland’s Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) and Saudi Arabia’s Center of Excellence for Advanced Materials Research has reported hitting 21.6% perovskite solar cell efficiency by using concentrator photovoltaic technology.
PSC with a concentrator
A triple-cation based, n-i-p structured perovskite cell has reportedly been developed at low levels of solar concentration. According to the researchers, standard single-junction perovskite cells usually reach efficiencies of 21% but only in devices smaller than 1mm². “The use of concentrator photovoltaics with a 0.81mm²-sized perovskite solar cell (PSC) further increased the efficiency levels up to 23.1% opening up a new line of research combining PSCs with low concentrating photovoltaic technologies,” the authors of the study wrote.
Scientists from Nanyang Technological University and Singapore's NTU, in collaboration with the University of Groningen (UG) in the Netherlands, have developed a method to analyze which pairs of materials in perovskite solar cells will harvest the most energy.
In their recent study, physicists Professor Sum Tze Chien from NTU and Professor Maxim Pshenichnikov from UG used extremely fast lasers to observe how an energy barrier forms when perovskite is joined with a material that extracts the electrical charges to make a solar cell.