The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced funding of up to $130 million for new research to advance early-stage solar technologies.

This funding program targets five research areas: photovoltaics (PV), concentrating solar-thermal power (CSP), soft costs reduction, innovations in manufacturing, and solar systems integration. These projects will aim to make solar energy more affordable, reliable, and secure, while working to boost domestic solar manufacturing, reduce red tape, and make PV more resilient to cyberattack.

Researchers at San Diego State University have found that perovskites can be used as catalysts to spur the chemical reactions necessary to make pharmaceutical drugs. Perovskite materials are said to be exponentially cheaper and more efficient than other catalysts used in drug synthesis. This research is funded by a three-year, $390,000 National Science Foundation (NSF) grant.

The team explained that photocatalysts today are made using expensive metals, such as iridium, ruthenium, rhodium, platinum, and palladium. These materials are also incredibly sensitive and require costly infrastructure — such as oxygen-free environments — that make the process of creating pharmaceuticals even more expensive. But perovskites, inexpensive hybrid materials with an organic and inorganic framework, can be used as photocatalysts.

Researchers at Linköping University have developed efficient perovskite near-infrared (NIR) light-emitting diodes. The external quantum efficiency is a record 21.6%. The work was led by Linköping scientist Feng Gao, in close collaboration with colleagues in China, Italy, Singapore and Switzerland.

The external quantum efficiency (the ratio of charge carriers emitted as light over all of those fed into the materials) of light-emitting diodes based on perovskites has until now been limited by defects that arise in the material during manufacture. The defects act as traps for the charge carriers and thus cause energy losses.

Researchers at NTU, lead by Assoc. Prof. Wang Hong, recently demonstrated high light extraction efficiency of perovskite photonic crystals fabricated by delicate electron-beam lithography.

The perovskite photonic crystals exhibit both emission rate inhibition and light energy redistribution simultaneously. They observed 7.9-fold reduction of spontaneous emission rate with a slower decay in perovskite photonic crystals due to photonic bandgap effect (PBG).