Oxford Photovoltaics announced that it was working with scientists at the new Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin (HZB) innovation lab to further the optimization of its perovskite cell materials for silicon heterojunction solar cell technology.

The new partnership with HZB aims at furthering commercialization efforts with greater leverage of HZB's silicon cell material knowledge and specifically heterojunction cells. 'Working with HZB to understand solar cell manufacturers' silicon cells, will allow Oxford PV's perovskite on silicon tandem formation to be fully optimized, to ensure the most efficient tandem solar cell, and the easy transfer of our technology into our commercial partner's industrial processes", commented Chris Case, Chief Technology Officer, at Oxford PV. 'Oxford PV is now in the final stage of commercializing its perovskite photovoltaic solution, which has the potential to enable efficiency gains that will transform the economics of silicon photovoltaic technology globally.'

Researchers at Duke University have developed a method to create otherwise unattainable (or extremely hard to create) hybrid thin-film materials. The new technique could open the door to new generations of solar cells, light-emitting diodes and photodetectors.

The most common perovskite used in solar energy today, methylammonium lead iodide (MAPbI3), can convert light to energy as well as today's best commercially available solar panels. This can even be done using a fraction of the material - a piece 100 times thinner than a typical silicon-based solar cell. Methylammonium lead iodide is one of the few perovskites that can be created using standard industry production techniques, though it still has issues with scalability and durability. To truly unlock the potential of perovskites, however, new manufacturing methods are needed because the mixture of organic and inorganic molecules in a complex crystalline structure can be difficult to make. Organic elements are particularly delicate, but are critical to the hybrid material's ability to absorb and emit light effectively.

Researchers from EPFL have produced a data-driven proposal for standardizing the measurements of perovskite solar cell stability and degradation. The work aims to create clarity and consensus in the field and overcome a major obstacle on the way to commercializing perovskite photovoltaics.

One of the greatest challenges on this road is stability: to be commercially viable, perovskite-based solar cells must be able to maintain their efficiency over time, meaning that they must not degrade significantly over 25 years of use. 'As a first-order approximation, we are talking about stabilities of several years for the most stable perovskite solar cells,' says Konrad Domanksi, first author on the paper. 'We still need an increase of an order of magnitude to reach the stabilities of silicon cells'.