Quantum Materials Corp., manufacturer of Cadmium-free quantum dots, recently announced it has developed a continuous flow manufacturing process to produce stable, low cost, high purity perovskite quantum dots (PQDs). Quantum Materials Corp has reportedly developed a high volume production process that produces extremely high purity PQDs with significantly improved stability.

PQDs have many unique properties that make them an ideal material for utilization in applications such as solar cells and displays. PQD-enhanced solar cells have demonstrated impressive conversion efficiencies, and as a phosphor replacement in flat panel displays, PQDs have the potential to provide industry excellent color gamut picture qualities due to their extremely narrow emission wavelength profile.

Researchers from KU Leuven in Belgium have demonstrated a promising direct X-ray detector design, based on a Cs₂AgBiBr₆ halide perovskite semiconductor. This perovskite is said to be ideal for direct X-ray conversion because of its ability to combine silver (Ag) and bismuth (Bi) heavy atomic nuclei – for efficient X-ray absorption – with their excellent charge formation and transport properties.

The researchers pointed out the all-inorganic double metal halide perovskite Cs₂AgBiBr₆ as one of the strongest candidates because of its high X-ray sensitivity and excellent structural stability. By optimizing the materials and lowering the operating temperature, they were even able to improve the X-ray sensitivity of the device tenfold, ultimately peaking near 500 times more sensitive than commercial direct conversion X-ray detectors on the market – commonly based on pure selenium (Se).

imec, the world-leading research and innovation hub, recently presented an impressive thin-film tandem solar cell at the EU PVSEC conference. The cell consists of a top perovskite cell developed by imec within the partnerships of EnergyVille and Solliance, and a bottom CIGS cell from the Centre for Solar Energy and Hydrogen Research (ZSW, Stuttgart, Germany). The tandem cell resulting from this collaboration achieves a record efficiency of 24.6%.

The perovskite top cell in the tandem uses light in the visible part of the solar spectrum, while the light in the near-IR spectrum that passes through the perovskite cell is harvested by the underlying CIGS cell. In this way, the tandem cell significantly outperforms the stand-alone perovskite and CIGS cells. Moreover, both perovskite and CIGS cells are thin-film solar cells, paving the way to high efficiency flexible solar cells and building integrated photovoltaic (BIPV) solutions.

Solliance Solar Research has announced a major accomplishment in the thermal stability of perovskite technology. The thermal stability was tested over a period of 3.000 hours. After this thermal stress test, the cell performance showed 93% of the initial performance.

Mehrdad Najafi, researcher at Solliance Solar Research, who will be presenting the work at the EU PVSEC in Belgium on September 27th, states: "Perovskite solar cells have attracted great attention due to their high power conversion efficiency Demonstrated stability and scale-ability, two very important topics within the Solliance collaboration, are the next steps towards successful commercialization of this technology. Our recent results show that it is possible to achieve stable perovskite solar cells upon prolonged exposure to thermal stress. After a further full-stack optimization and the introduction of a metal oxide layer by means of Atomic Layer Deposition (ALD), the thermal stability improved drastically compared with our previous reference: instead of losing over 50% of its performance after 100 hours at 85oC, we now demonstrate only 7% of performance loss after 3.000 hours at 85oC. This is an important stepping stone towards full IEC compliance".