The following post is a sponsored post by MBRAUN

Prof. Dr. Steve Albrecht and his 11-member team of the Helmholtz Innovation Lab HySPRINT at
Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin (HZB) develop tandem solar cells that combine the advantages of silicon
and perovskite solar cells. In order to create the best research conditions, Prof. Albrecht had installed
systems from the market leaders, MBRAUN and CreaPhys (a part of MBRAUN).

HySPRINT Perovskite Lab © HZB / M. Setzpfandt

The Perovskite cluster is composed of 4 different parts: Precursor synthesis, wet coating with spin coater, evaporation of perovskites and metallization, scaling with inkjet printer and slot die coater under laminar flow. Every part of the cluster is integrated in inert gloveboxes under inert atmosphere to guarantee the best performance of the devices, as well as the best repeatability of the processes.

Researchers at the Japanese Kanazawa University aim to improve the performance of perovskite solar cells by using two kinds of titanium oxide - anatase and brookite.

The team claims to have reached a conversion efficiency of 16.82% in a perovskite cell by applying a brookite layer made of water-solute brookite nanoparticles on an anatase layer. This reportedly helps to improve the transport of electrons from the center of the cell to its electrodes, while also preventing charges from recombining at the border between the perovskite material and the electron transport layer. “Together, both these effects allow us to achieve higher solar cell efficiencies,” said the research coordinator, Md. Shahiduzzaman.

Researchers at the Energy Research Center of the Netherlands (ECN) have developed a bifacial tandem solar cell with a conversion efficiency of 30.2%. The new cell device – created with Dutch consortium Solliance – was made by applying a newly developed perovskite cell on top of an industrial bifacial crystalline silicon version.

This approach, according to the scientists, enables a significantly higher power conversion efficiency as one cell is optimized for high energy photons, and the other low energy particles. “The tandem device proposed here uses a four-terminal configuration, thus having separate circuits for the top and bottom cells that allow for dynamic fine tuning and optimization of the energy yield,” the creators of the cell wrote. The cell is also said to be better able to capture light on its front and rear sides by responding to the variability of incident light through its electronic design.