Dyesol recently secured a £800,000 ($1.05 million) grant by the U.K.’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) for the continued research in the optimization of charge carrier mobility in nanoporous metal oxide films and will enable the Australian organic cell developer to better understand the impact of halide modified titania on Perovskite cell performance.

The EPSRC is the U.K.’s main agency for funding research in engineering and the physical sciences, and this grant will be delivered specifically to Dyesol UK, Cristal and the University of York. The grant monies will, Dyesol said, help support better understanding of the chemistry of the improved electron capture and transport technique.

A team of researchers from the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has reported a perovskite-based phosphor-based white light converter with a modulation bandwidth around 40 times higher than common LED phosphors. This result could put an end to today's VLC bottleneck when using white LEDs.

By mixing solution-processed CsPbBr3 perovskite nanocrystals (NCs) with a conventional red phosphor, they obtained what they describe as a perovskite-based phosphor white light converter with a modulation bandwidth of 491MHz, which could support high data rate up to 2 Gbit/s, much faster than Wi-Fi. In addition to exhibiting a shorter excited lifetime, the red phosphor and perovskite composite material yields a white light with a high colour rendering index of 89 and a correlated colour temperature of 3236 K, which makes the white LED suitable for comfort lighting applications.

Researchers from the Graphene Flagship, working at the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT) and the University of Rome Tor Vergata, show that interface engineering with layered materials is important for boosting perovskite solar cell performance and that the lifetime of perovskite solar cells is significantly enhanced by using few-layer molybdenum disulphide (MoS2) flakes (a semiconductor material with a layered structure).

The team managed to significantly enhance the stability of perovskite solar cells (PSCs) by including few-layer MoS2 flakes as an active buffer layer in the cell design. These PSCs retain 93% of the initial light conversion efficiency after 550 h, compared to only 66% for cells without the MoS2 buffer layer. This represents an important step towards viable PSCs, especially as the addition of the MoS2 interface layer is compatible with low-cost solution processing techniques.