An international collaboration between scientists from CSIRO, University of Cambridge and others has resulted in a new efficiency record for fully roll-to-roll printed solar cells.
According to the team, the cells achieved “power conversion efficiencies of up to 15.5% for individual small-area cells and 11.0% for serially-interconnected cells”.
Dr. Anthony Chesman – whose team had its flexible perovskite solar cells launched aboard a Space Machines Company satellite last week – said over a decade of R&D was behind the result.
“CSIRO’s thin and light-weight solar cells are now on the cusp of emerging from the lab to create clean energy in the real world,” said Chesman in a recent statement. “Roll-to-roll printing allows for the solar cells to be manufactured on very long, continuous rolls of plastic, which can dramatically increase the rate of production.
“As these methods are already widely used in the printing industry, this makes their production more accessible for Australian manufacturers... The successful commercialization of printed flexible solar cells has the potential to create significant economic and environmental benefits for Australia and the world.”
Dr. Doojin Vak, a CSIRO Principal Research Scientist, added that an automated system produced a comprehensive dataset that will pave the way for machine learning to be used in further research.
“We developed a system for rapidly producing and testing over ten thousand solar cells a day – something that would have been impossible to do manually,” said Vak. “This allowed us to identify the optimal settings for the various parameters in the roll-to-roll process and quickly pinpoint the conditions that deliver the best results,” he said.
CSIRO said it is currently seeking industry partners to commercialize the work.
