The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) has announced seven new Prosperity Partnership projects that will build links between the UK’s research base and leading industry partners. The new projects will focus on four of the Industrial Strategy Grand Challenges (ISCF) , involve nineteen industry partners and ten universities, and will fund 50 studentships.

Prosperity Partnerships are EPSRC’s flagship approach to co-investing with business in long-term, use-inspired, basic research. They are five-year, multi-million pound research collaborations on topics of national and global importance which have been co-created by leading UK universities and businesses with a strong research presence in the UK.

Researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences have designed perovskite solar cells with power conversion efficiency of 18.1% by adding Titanium (Ti) cathode layer.

Two different device configurations including n-i-p and p-i-n have been adopted for fabricating the PSCs. As organic electron transport layers (ETLs), fullerene and its derivatives (C60 and PCBM) play an important role in efficient PSCs with p-i-n structure (ITO/Hole transport layers/perovskite/ETLs/Cathode). However, the cathode metal atoms diffuse through the organic ETLs to the perovskite layer, causing degradation of PSCs. Also, the instability and high-cost of organic ETLs were limiting factors for the commercialization of PSCs. Considering these problems, the research team led by Dr. LI Xinhua, developed the ultra-thin Ti cathode interlayer to replace organic ETLs for fabricating efficient and low-cost PSCs.

Researchers at the Energy Materials and Surface Sciences Unit at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST) have designed a new method to fabricate low-cost high-efficiency solar cells. Prof. Yabing Qi and his team from OIST, in collaboration with Prof. Shengzhong Liu from Shaanxi Normal University, China, developed the cells using perovskite materials.

In what Prof. Qi defines as "the golden triangle," solar cell technologies need to fulfill three conditions to be worth commercializing: their conversion rate of sunlight into electricity must be high, they must be inexpensive to produce, and they must have a long lifespan. Today, most commercial solar cells are made from crystalline silicon, which has a relatively high efficiency of around 22%. Though silicon, the raw material for these solar cells, is abundant, processing it tends to be complex and shoots up the manufacturing costs, making the finished product expensive.

Researchers at Penn State have gained new insight into how halide perovskite materials enable the efficient conversion of sunlight into electricity.

Scientists state that halide perovskites tend to have a unique tolerance for imperfections in their structures, which allows them to efficiently convert sunlight into electricity when other materials with similar imperfections do not. What makes these materials so tolerant of imperfections, however, was unknown prior to this study. The researchers used ultrafast infrared imaging technology to investigate how the structure and composition of these materials influence their ability to convert sunlight into electricity.