September 2015

A team led by Brown University researchers has been awarded $4 million by the National Science Foundation to study perovskite solar cells. The research will be performed in partnership with the University of Nebraska'Lincoln (UNL) and Rhode Island College (RIC).

The research will aim at better understanding the basic science behind these solar cells, looking for ways to develop new technologies based on that understanding, and investigating scalable production methods that could one day bring perovskite solar cells to market. Another issue the researchers will look to address is the fact that the best performing perovskite solar cells contain lead. The team will look for lead-free perovskite compositions that work equally well.

Researchers at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have succeeded in growing atomically thin 2D sheets of organic-inorganic hybrid perovskites from a solution. The sheets are claimed to be of high quality and large in area.

The scientists state that this is the first example of 2D atomically thin nanostructures made from ionic materials and that the results of this study open up opportunities for fundamental research on the synthesis and characterization of atomically thin 2D hybrid perovskites and introduce a new family of 2D solution-processed semiconductors for nanoscale optoelectronic devices, such as field effect transistors and photodetectors.

Saule Technologies has signed an investment deal with Hideo Sawada, a Japanese investment company. Saule aims to combine perovskite solar cells with other currently available products, and this investment agreement came only a year after the company was launched.

Scientists at Case Western Reserve University that have been experimenting with the use of small perovskite solar cells to help recharge the batteries of electric cars state that they have found a system that performs better than any other. They wired four perovskite solar cells in series to directly photo-charge lithium batteries with 7.8% efficiency.

The researchers say that they have found the right match between the solar cell and battery. The coupling appears to have outperformed all other reported pairings of photo-charging components and compatible batteries or supercapacitors. They have created cells with three layers converted into a single perovskite film and then wired four of the 1 mm square cells in series, achieving a solar-to-electric power conversion efficiency of 12.65%. When hooked up to charge small coin-sized lithium-ion batteries, the team achieved a conversion and storage efficiency of 7.8% and maintained it over a number of cycles.

Australia-based organic PV and perovskite solar cell (PSC) developer Dyesol declares a major breakthrough in perovskite stability for solar applications. Stability and durability were among the biggest challenges with which perovskite PVs were faced in recent years, with the material sensitive to moisture contact and high efficiency perovskite cells exhibiting high degradation rates.

Now, Dyesol claims to have made a significant breakthrough on small perovskite solar cells, with 'meaningful numbers' of 10% efficient strip cells exhibiting less than 10% relative degradation when exposed to continuous light soaking for over 1000 hours. The cells were encapsulated and tested at full sun intensity for this duration and exhibited relatively low degradation levels, according to the company. Dyesol has not exposed what form of encapsulation was used for the cells tested (as both flexible and traditional glass encapsulation are suitable for PSC applications).

Researchers at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) have developed efficient and low-cost semitransparent perovskite solar cells with graphene electrodes. The power conversion efficiencies (PCEs) of this novel invention are around 12% when they are illuminated from Fluorine-doped Tin Oxide bottom electrodes (FTO) or the graphene top electrodes, compared with 7% of conventional semitransparent solar cells.

PolyU researchers used graphene as an electrode material, after creating simple processing techniques for enhancing the conductivity of graphene to meet the requirement of its applications in solar cells. To begin with, the conductivity of graphene was dramatically improved by coating a thin layer of conductive polymer that was also used as an adhesion layer to the perovskite active layer during the lamination process. Im addition, the performance of this novel invention is further optimized by improving the contact between the top graphene electrodes and the hole transport layer on the perovskite films.

We are proud to be writing the first in what we hope will become a long line of Perovskite-Info posts.

This site was established in order to provide a deeper understanding and up-to-date knowledge in the field of perovskite materials, applications, recent researches, progress and innovations.