July 2020

Scientists at UC San Diego have developed a new method to fabricate perovskites as single-crystal thin films, which are more efficient for use in solar cells and optical devices than the current state-of-the-art polycrystalline forms of the material.

Their fabrication method - which uses standard semiconductor fabrication processes - results in flexible single-crystal perovskite films with controlled area, thickness, and composition. These single-crystal films showed fewer defects, greater efficiency, and enhanced stability than their polycrystalline counterparts, which could lead to the use of perovskites in solar cells, LEDs, and photodetectors.

In a recent report, Camilo X. Quintela and an international group in materials science, physics and engineering in the U.S., Norway, China and South Korea proposed a novel direction for materials design based on nitride antiperovskite and oxide perovskite crystals.

Schematic representation of the crystal structures of M3XN nitride antiperovskite and ABO3 oxide perovskite compounds and their interfaces. Image from Science Advances

In this work, they successfully layered perovskites and antiperovskites together, to create an interface with unique electrical properties for applications in a new class of quantum materials.

Australia-based RRAM developer 4DS Memory announced that it has raised a total of $7.6 million AUD ($5.45 million USD) in two financing round. The 4DS memory cell is constructed using an advanced perovskite material, which has the same crystal structure as the inorganic compound calcium titanium oxide.

4DS Memory says that it will use the funds to further develop its Interface Switching ReRAM technology with imec and Western Digital's subsidiary, HGST.

A new study, led by Dr. Shayanti Mukherjee at the Australian Hudson Institute (a leading Australian translational medical research institute), has found that perovskites materials can have anti-microbial properties, without toxic side effects to human cells.

(A) process of perovskite synthesis; (B) preparation of electrospinning solution with perovskite. Image from Nanomaterials

Dr Mukherjee and her team, who already have a significant program researching new bio-degradable nanomeshes to revolutionize treatments for pelvic organ prolapse (POP), have shown for the first time that perovskites can be used as additives to engineer human tissue implants.

Researchers at Swansea University, Imperial College London and the University of Oxford have launched a project to drive next-generation solar technology into new applications. The team has been awarded a £6 million Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) grant to advance organic and perovskite solar cells into applications that current solar technologies are not suitable for.

The promise of such next-gen PV could make it suitable for new applications that will be critical to advances such as:

• 5G, which requires ultra-lightweight sources of power for pseudo-satellites and high altitude unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)
• The Internet of Things, for which sensors and computing devices are increasingly embedded into everyday objects
• Zero-carbon buildings and vehicles, which could use their roofs, walls and windows to generate power.

Researchers at Pusan National University, Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology and the Korea Institute of Machinery & Materials (KIMM) in South Korea have tackled perovskite solar cells' stability issues by designing a graphene-based encapsulation technique.

The team introduced a highly flexible and stable graphene encapsulant by adopting the dry transfer method based on a roll-based process.

Australian Scientists from the University of New South Wales have outlined a new method for ensuring more of the sun's energy can be converted into electricity by using sunlight that would otherwise be wasted as heat.

In a photovoltaic solar cell, sunlight is converted into electricity through a process called the photoelectric effect, where individual packets of light, called photons, transfer their energy onto electrons within the solar cell material. If a sufficient amount of energy is transferred by light to an electron, an amount of energy known as the 'bandgap', the electron is knocked loose from its atom and creates an electric current. This is the process by which solar panels convert light into electricity.

Researchers from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST) have created next-generation perovskite-based solar modules with high efficiency and good stability. These solar modules can reportedly maintain a high performance for over 2000 hours.

"There are three conditions that perovskites must meet: they must be cheap to produce, highly efficient and have a long lifespan," said Professor Yabing Qi, head of the OIST Energy Materials and Surface Sciences Unit, who led this study.

A team of researchers from MIT and Northwestern University has created hybrid perovskite materials that could help improve the quality of solar cells and light sources. They demonstrated the ability to fine-tune the electronic properties of these hybrid perovskite materials.

The materials are classified as 'hybrid' because they contain inorganic components like metals, as well as organic molecules with elements like carbon and nitrogen, organized into nanoscale layers. In the new paper, the researchers showed that by strategically varying the composition of the organic layers, they could tune the color of light absorbed by the perovskite and also the wavelength at which the material emitted light. Importantly, they accomplished this without substantially changing the inorganic component.

Researchers at the University of Sydney and University of New South Wales working with chemists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the United States have created a highly efficient and long-lasting solar-flow battery, which is a way to generate, store, and redeliver renewable electricity from the sun in one device.

The new device is made of perovskite-silicon tandem solar cells integrated with specially designed chemical battery components. The solar-flow battery achieved a new record efficiency of 20 percent conversion of energy from the sun. This is 40 percent more efficient than the previous record for solar-flow batteries, which were also developed in the University of Wisconsin Jin lab where lead author, PhD student Wenjie Li, is based.