Perovskite Solar - Page 38

Reports suggest that REVKOR Energy Holdings, a U.S-based renewable energy company, and H2GEMINI Technology Consulting, a Swiss-German manufacturer of solar machinery and equipment, have formed a partnership to construct turnkey HJT solar cell and module manufacturing facilities and collaborate on the development of new generations of high-efficiency HJT/perovskite solar cell architectures.

Under the terms of the partnership, REVKOR and H2GEMINI will collaborate to establish high-efficiency HJT PV cell and module production across multiple project sites, with a targeted capacity of 20GW by 2026. The first phase of the project will focus on building a 5GW annual production facility, aiming for production to begin by the second quarter of 2024. Subsequently, in Phase Two, the capacity will be expanded to a total of 20GW by the end of 2025. This partnership comes just before the completion of REVKOR's Phase One facility on August 5th, 2023, spanning 1,067,000 Sq Ft in Salt Lake City, will become operational late second quarter 2024, with the HJT/Perovskite 5 GW equipment fully installed, this facility is meant by Revkor (as mentioned on its website) to become the first HJT/perovskite solar cell and panel manufacturing plant in the United States.

Scientists at Singapore's Nanyang Technological University (NTU) have built Three new satellites, that were successfully blasted off into orbit, taking NTU’s total satellite launch count to 13. These satellites (called SCOOB-II, VELOX-AM and ARCADE) will be used to conduct orbital experiments such as testing 3D-printed parts in space, measuring atmospheric data, and evaluating new space materials.

The ARCADE (Atmospheric Coupling and Dynamics Explorer) satellite aims to measure data for atmospheric coupling studies. It carries unique instruments, among which are newly developed flexible perovskite solar cells, which will be used in experiments to test their performance in Low Earth Orbit for potential applications in curved, rollable solar panels.

South Korea’s automotive giant, Hyundai Motor Group, recently unveiled several new nanotechnologies for future mobility at the Nano Tech Day 2023 event in Seoul. 

Besides inventions like a “self-healing polymer coating” that enables the car to repair its own scratches, perovskite/silicon tandem solar cells were also introduced. It was said that Hyundai Motor Group believes that by applying tandem solar cells to areas that receive direct sunlight, such as the engine compartment cover, top panel, and doors of eco-friendly vehicles, it will be possible to generate enough electricity for daily driving.

Italy-based equipment manufacturer Teknisolar will become a partner of the PEPPERONI project, a four-year research and innovation project co-funded under Horizon Europe and jointly coordinated by Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin and Qcells. The project aims to support Europe in reaching its renewable energy target of climate neutrality by 2050, and it will also help advance perovskite/silicon tandem photovoltaic (PV) technology’s journey toward market introduction and mass manufacturing.

In its role in the PEPPERONI project, Teknisolar will design a pilot lamination line through a series of in-house tests on perovskite solar panels to later improve upon the design through implementation on the pilot line. Teknisolar’s ultimate goal is to extend the lamination technology from pilot line to gigawatt scale (mass production). PEPPERONI comprises 17 partners from 12 countries, combining European knowledge and expertise from fundamental research to small-scale testing and development of solar cells, all the way to high-throughput industrial manufacturing of large solar modules.

The European Commission recently approved, under EU State aid rules, a €89.5 million (over USD$99 million) Italian measure made available through the Recovery and Resilience Facility (‘RRF') to support the expansion of 3Sun's solar panel plant in Catania, Sicily. 

The aid will take the form of a €89.5 million direct grant to support 3Sun's investment for the expansion of its solar panels factory in Catania, Sicily. 3Sun is part of the Enel Group. The project will expand the annual capacity of 3Sun's existing plant from 200 MW to more than 3 GW. It will also introduce tandem perovskite PV technology, which will improve the panel efficiency and therefore increase the energy generated by each MW installed. The factory will be the largest solar panels manufacturing site in Europe, which will ultimately reduce the EU dependency on imports from foreign manufacturers. 

Sweat is less invasive to collect than blood, and can tell a lot about a person's health. This is the premise behind the wearable sweat sensors developed by Wei Gao, assistant professor of medical engineering at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). Over the past five years, Gao has steadily added features to his wearables, making them capable of reading out levels of salts, sugars, uric acid, amino acids, and vitamins as well as more complex molecules like C-reactive protein that can provide timely assessment of certain health risks. Most recently, in collaboration with Martin Kaltenbrunner's group at Johannes Kepler University Linz in Austria, Gao has powered these wearable biosensors with a flexible perovskite solar cell (FPSC).

Perovskite is as much as 1,000 times thinner than silicon solar cell layers, making them "quasi-2D" in Gao's terms. Perovskites can also be tuned to the spectra of different lighting, from outdoor sunlight to various forms of indoor lighting. Importantly, perovskite solar cells can achieve a higher power conversion efficiency (PCE) than silicon, which means they can convert a greater proportion of the light they receive into usable electricity. The flexible perovskite solar cell (FPSC) on Gao's wearable sweat sensor has a record-breaking PCE exceeding 31 percent under indoor light illumination. 

Researchers from The University of Sydney, CSIRO Energy and Australia's Nuclear Science and Technology Organization have shown that perovskite solar cells damaged by proton radiation in low-Earth orbit can recover up to 100% of their original efficiency via annealing in thermal vacuum.

This is achieved through careful design of the hole transport material (HTM), which is used to transport photo-generated positive charges to the electrode in the cell.

Researchers from the University of Toledo, NREL and the University of Colorado Boulder have designed highly efficient, bifacial, single-junction perovskite solar cells based on a p-i-n (or inverted) architecture. In this work, the team showed that bifacial perovskite photovoltaics technology has the potential to outperform its monofacial counterparts.

The team used optical and electrical modeling to guide the optimization of the transparent conducting rear electrode and perovskite absorber layer using a p-i-n device architecture, achieving a high bifaciality of about 91%–93% and a high front-side illumination PCE of over 23%. Under concurrent bifacial measurement conditions, the equivalent, stabilized bifacial power output densities were 26.9, 28.5, and 30.1 mW/cm² under albedos of 0.2, 0.3, and 0.5, respectively. 

Researchers from Switzerland's Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and Peking University have developed a perovskite solar cell with a 2D/3D heterojunction architecture.

The cell uses a 2D perovskite layer at the interface between the perovskite and the hole transport layer, which the researchers said can improve charge-carrier transport/extraction while suppressing ion migration. Cells with this architecture usually exhibit large exciton binding energies and are generally more stable than conventional 3D devices due to the protection provided by the organic ligands.

A new European project focused on perovskites has been launched, called “EFESO” (Exploiting Flexible pErovskites Solar technOlogies). It is a new fully funded
Horizon-Europe project, lead by Dr. Luigi Angelo Castriotta, Post Doctoral fellow of the University of Rome Tor Vergata.

The project aims to advance the upscaling of stable Flexible Perovskite Solar Modules (FPSMs) by optimizing fabrication processes on flexible substrates, reducing inactive areas on modules and working on lead (Pb) trapping intrinsically, using doping and interface engineering, and extrinsically by
encapsulation strategies.