A research team from the Institute of Physical Chemistry of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IPC PAS) in Warsaw and the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Lausanne (Switzerland), co-operating within the GOTSolar project, has demonstrated a perovskite solar cell with a significantly smaller number of structural defects. The unexpected improvement of the photovoltaic performance was observed when perovskites produced by mechanochemistry were used for the construction of a typical photovoltaic cell.

The group from IPC PAS (Warsaw University of Technology) was the first to demonstrate that polycrystalline halide perovskites (CH3NH3)PbI3 can be produced in mechanochemical reactions . Recently, the group presented the mechanochemical production of mixed perovskites, those in which several different types of ions alternate in position A. This is an important achievement, because by carefully altering the chemical composition of the perovskite materials, they can be adapted to specific applications in photovoltaics, catalysis and other fields of science and technology.

Saule Technologies will be presenting a flexible, printed, perovskite photovoltaic module the size of an A4 sheet of paper, for the first time, at the IDTechEx Show on November 15-16th in Santa Clara, CA. The operating Saule module is printed on an ultrathin plastic foil able to charge personal electronic devices, demonstrating one of the many possible applications of these perovskite solar cells. The prototype industry-scale production line is estimated to begin in 2018.

"Scaling up the size of perovskite solar cells is one of the biggest challenges for companies and researchers working with this technology. Printing a stable and operating A4 size module has been among our most important milestones for 2017 and we are more than happy to be able to present it for the first time in the USA," says the CTO and co-founder at Saule Technologies.