Perovskite Solar - Page 52

Researchers at Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin (HZB) recently announced a new tandem solar cell that converts 32.5% of the incident solar radiation into electrical energy.

The certifying institute European Solar Test Installation (ESTI) in Italy measured the tandem cell and officially confirmed this value which is also included in the NREL chart of solar cell technologies, maintained by the National Renewable Energy Lab, USA.

U.S-based company CubicPV has announced plans to establish 10 GW of conventional mono wafer capacity in the United States. 

While CubicPV reports that its new factory will produce conventional silicon wafers, the company said it will continue research and development of its tandem modules, which reportedly offer more than 30% greater efficiency than the highest efficiency conventional modules. The design stacks two solar cells, with silicon on the bottom, powered by CubicPV’s Direct Wafer technology, and perovskite on the top, the company claims that the tandem design “will dramatically increase the power of every acre of solar deployed.”

The Netherlands' province of North Brabant, the Brabant Development Agency (BOM) and TNO – partner in Solliance – have signed a cooperation agreement for perovskite solar cells and integrated solar energy products. 

At the Brainport Industry Campus (BIC) in Eindhoven, TNO is working on flexible solar energy laminates that can then be processed into components for buildings, infrastructure and vehicles. The research line was devised by TNO and built by partners from the business community – including MAAN and Duflex – with financial support from the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate. The line of research will also play a major role in the European project MC2.0, which will start in January 2023 under the leadership of TNO and for which 20 partners from different countries will provide input. In parallel, the research program on industrialize production of perovskites, is running. The goal is to bring both studies together in mass customization based on perovskite.

An international research collaboration that was led by UCLA and included teams from Marmara University in Turkey, Sungkyunkwan University in Korea, Dalian University of Technology and Westlake University in China, Washington State University, UC Irvine and Washington University in St. Louis, has developed a way to use perovskites in solar cells while protecting it from the conditions that cause it to deteriorate.

The scientists added small quantities of neodymium ions directly to the perovskite. They found not only that the augmented perovskite was much more durable when exposed to light and heat, but also that it converted light to electricity more efficiently.

Researchers from EMPA (Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology), University of Cantabria and National Tsing Hua University have created a bifacial perovskite-CIGS tandem solar cell and developed a new low-temperature production process resulting in record efficiencies of 19.8% for front and 10.9% for rear illumination.

The idea is collecting direct sunlight, as well as its reflection via the rear end of the solar cell, which should increase the yield of energy the cell produces. Potential applications are, for instance, building-integrated photovoltaics, agrivoltaics – the simultaneous use of areas of land for both photovoltaic power generation and agriculture – and vertically or high-tilt installed solar modules on high-altitude grounds.

China's GCL Photoelectric Materials, a subsidiary of GCL TECH, announced the completion of RMB 500 million (around USD$72,000,000) B+ round of financing, which was jointly led by Temasek, Sequoia China, and IDG Capital, followed by Longwater Investment and other institutions.

It was reported that this round of financing will be used to improve the process and equipment development of the 100MW perovskite module production line of GCL Photoelectric Materials.

Meyer Burger Technology has signed multi-year cooperation agreements with CSEM from Switzerland, Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin (HZB), the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems ISE in Freiburg, and the Institute of Photovoltaics at the University of Stuttgart, for the development of high-performance perovskite tandem solar cells and modules.

These activities are focused on the industrialization of the new technologies, moving from the laboratory to mass production with a view to the future expansion of gigawatt capacities at Meyer Burger’s production sites. The aim of the cooperation is the industrial production of solar cells with efficiencies of more than 30 percent.

Researchers from China's East China Normal University (ECNU), Shanghai University, Donghua University and Soochow University have fabricated an inverted perovskite solar cell with remarkable charge transport.

They reportedly suppressed carrier recombination at the interface between the perovskite and the charge transport layer, as well as defect-assisted recombination originating from the perovskite layer. The cell has a p-i-n structure, which means the perovskite cell material is deposited onto the hole transport layer, and then coated with the electron transport layer, unlike with conventional n-i-p device architecture. Inverted perovskite solar cells typically show strong stability, but lag behind conventional devices in terms of conversion efficiency and cell performance.

Researchers from Eindhoven University of Technology, Delft University of Technology and TNO (partner in Solliance) have designed an integrated solar-assisted water-splitting system with a flow electrochemical cell and a monolithic perovskite-silicon tandem solar cell.

The team's work demonstrates how a perovskite/silicon tandem cell can be combined with a water electrolyzer system. However, the team said that there are still many steps that need to be taken before commercialization is possible. For example: upscaling the technology, addressing stability in greater detail, and use of more earth-abundant catalysts in the water-splitting reaction.

Researchers at Oxford University, ARC Centre of Excellence for Exciton Science at Monash University,  National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have demonstrated a new way to create stable perovskite solar cells, with fewer defects and the potential to rival silicon's durability.

By removing the solvent dimethyl-sulfoxide and introducing dimethylammonium chloride as a crystallization agent, the researchers were able to better control the intermediate phases of the perovskite crystallization process, leading to thin films of greater quality, with reduced defects and enhanced stability.