Researchers at UC Merced, Professors Sayantani Ghosh and David Strubbe and their students in the Department of Physics, have been working on a NASA initiative to fabricate solar cells in space and turn sunlight into electricity. “One of the big challenges with solar cells is that they are heavy, and NASA has been building them on Earth and then taking them into space,” Ghosh said.

Ghosh and her lab work with perovskites - they developed a simple, efficient process for creating perovskite solar films called “electrospraying.” The method does not require gravity because it creates its own electric field and creates extremely smooth solar-energy-absorbing films. Now the researchers want to see if NASA can put it to use.

Researchers at UC Merced, Professors Sayantani Ghosh and David Strubbe and their students in the Department of Physics, have been working on a NASA initiative to fabricate solar cells in space and turn sunlight into electricity. “One of the big challenges with solar cells is that they are heavy, and NASA has been building them on Earth and then taking them into space,” Ghosh said.

Ghosh and her lab work with perovskites - they developed a simple, efficient process for creating perovskite solar films called “electrospraying.” The method does not require gravity because it creates its own electric field and creates extremely smooth solar-energy-absorbing films. Now the researchers want to see if NASA can put it to use.

Researchers at the University of Rome Tor Vergata in Italy have investigated how cells containing two-dimensional titanium-carbide MXene support layers could improve perovskite solar cell performance.

To obtain good power conversion within a perovskite solar cell, all layers and layer interfaces within the cell must have good compatibility. Typical cells contain the active perovskite material sandwiched between two charge transport layers, which are then adjacent to their corresponding electrodes. Support layers may also be added. Charge mobility, energy barriers, interface energy alignment, and interfacial vacancies all impact compatibility and subsequent cell performance and stability. Thus, engineering well-suited interfaces with the cell is paramount to cell success and long-term stability, an important criterion for potential commercialization.

MIT researchers have designed perovskite photovoltaic-powered sensors that could potentially transmit data for years before they need to be replaced. To this end, the team mounted thin-film perovskite cells as energy-harvesters on inexpensive radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags.

The cells could power the sensors in both bright sunlight and dimmer indoor conditions. Moreover, the team found the solar power actually gives the sensors a major power boost that enables greater data-transmission distances and the ability to integrate multiple sensors onto a single RFID tag.