Scientists from Nanyang Technological University and Singapore's NTU, in collaboration with the University of Groningen (UG) in the Netherlands, have developed a method to analyze which pairs of materials in perovskite solar cells will harvest the most energy.

In their recent study, physicists Professor Sum Tze Chien from NTU and Professor Maxim Pshenichnikov from UG used extremely fast lasers to observe how an energy barrier forms when perovskite is joined with a material that extracts the electrical charges to make a solar cell.

Scientists at Duke University have used their electronic structure based materials modeling software on a supercomputer to help demonstrate the advantages of incorporating organic building blocks into hybrid perovskites.

The models showed that the new materials feature improved stability and safety while exhibiting a “quantum well” behavior that can improve the performance of optoelectronic devices such as solar cells, LEDs and optical computers, making the hybrid perovskites more attractive for use in a broad range of applications.

An international research team that included scientists from the University of Exeter, in the U.K., Switzerland’s Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) and Saudi Arabia’s Center of Excellence for Advanced Materials Research has reported hitting 21.6% perovskite solar cell efficiency by using concentrator photovoltaic technology.

PSC with a concentrator

A triple-cation based, n-i-p structured perovskite cell has reportedly been developed at low levels of solar concentration. According to the researchers, standard single-junction perovskite cells usually reach efficiencies of 21% but only in devices smaller than 1mm². “The use of concentrator photovoltaics with a 0.81mm²-sized perovskite solar cell (PSC) further increased the efficiency levels up to 23.1% opening up a new line of research combining PSCs with low concentrating photovoltaic technologies,” the authors of the study wrote.