Researchers at South Korea's KRICT, led by Seo Jang-won, have demonstrated pilot-scale "roll-to-roll" (R2R) manufacturing of flexible and light perovskite solar cells.

As an eco-friendly antisolvent, Seo's team introduced tert-butyl alcohol (tBuOH), a colorless solid, which melts near room temperature and has a camphor-like odor, for R2R processing through cooperation with VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland.

Sweden-based perovskite-based PV start-up Evolar has announced an investment from Norwegian renewables investor Magnora as it targets rapid commercialization of its technology.

Evolar has been researching the development of perovskites in solar cells, and Evolar now intends to help commercialize the technology. Evolar’s approach is to add a perovskite-based thin-film layer to cells to create a tandem solar cell, which the company said is expected to increase module efficiency by five percentage points.

The U.S government's Solar Energy Technologies Office (SETO) Fiscal Year 2020 funding program has been released, supporting projects that will improve the affordability, reliability, and value of solar technologies on the U.S. grid and tackle emerging challenges in the solar industry.

This program funds projects that advance early-stage photovoltaic (PV), concentrating solar-thermal power (CSP), and systems integration technologies, and reduce the non-hardware costs associated with installing solar energy systems. Two perovskite-related projects have been included in this program.

The University of Macau (UM) Institute of Applied Physics and Materials Engineering (IAPME) and Nanjing Tech University jointly developed a method to prepare phase-pure quasi two-dimensional (2D) metal-halide perovskites, which could be used for constructing stable perovskite solar cells.

Thanks to their excellent optoelectronic properties and low production cost, metal-halide perovskites have been considered as the most innovative material in light harvesting and light emission. However, the very low formation energy of the typically used three-dimensional (3D) perovskites accounts for their low stability and seriously hinders the commercialization of perovskite optoelectronic devices. Recent studies show that the dimensionality of deposited perovskites could be reduced from 3D to quasi 2D by introducing an appropriate amount of long organic cations into the precursor solution, which can greatly improve the stability of perovskites thanks to the protection offered by the organic cation layer on the surface. Nevertheless, such 2D perovskites typically consist of multiple quantum wells with a random well width distribution because of the thermodynamic stability of compounds in the solution. The thick quantum wells and 3D perovskite within the deposited film will still limit the overall stability of the material. Therefore, the deposition of phase-pure quasi 2D perovskite remains a key scientific challenge.

Energy Materials Corporation (EMC) has stated its plans for roll-to-roll printing of perovskite PV on glass.

The plan is backed by two partnerships—one with the Eastman Kodak Company for roll-to-roll printing and another with glass and ceramics company Corning, for flexible glass. EMC’s funding includes a $4 million research grant from the Solar Energy Technologies Office of the U.S. Department of Energy.

Researchers from South Korea’s Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST) have reported a conversion efficiency of 25.17% in a perovskite solar cell, achieved by minimizing the deformation for the microstructure of photoactive layers in the device.

The inner structure of the newly-developed photoactive layer, as well as the working principle of the perovskite cell. Image: Unist

The team explained that the microstructure of these layers, which generate an electric charge and send it to electrodes, can be deformed - which affects the efficiency of the charge transfer itself. “This is because the extracted electric charges disappear when defects are formed,” they explained.

A research team, jointly led by Professor Gun-Tae Kim and Professor Jun-Hee Lee in the School of Energy and Chemical Engineering at South-Korea's UNIST has succeeded in developing high-performance perovskite oxide catalysts using late transition metal oxide materials. In the process, the team discovered the reason behind the improved performance of both the oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) and oxygen evolution reaction (OER), which has been explained by the change in the oxidation state of the transition metal caused by the increase in oxygen vacancies.

Perovskite oxide catalysts are composed of lanthanide, transition metal and oxygen. Owing to the excellent electrical conductivity and bifunctional ORR/OER activity, these catalysts have been considered to be an attractive candidate for metal-air batteries or fuel cells, in which opposite reactions, such as charging and discharging occur steadily. However, due to the high cost and low stability of noble metal catalysts, the development of alternatives is strongly desired.

Researchers at The University of Cambridge and Zhejiang University recently created highly efficient LEDs by depositing mixed-dimensional perovskites on a thin lithium fluoride interface. The fabrication method they used reportedly resulted in LEDs with impressive external quantum efficiencies, while also enabling the deposition of perovskites on a material that they are typically incompatible with.

Image from Nature Electronics

The researchers have been conducting research into perovskite-based LEDs for a few years now. Back in 2018, they created a near-infrared LED using perovskite-polymer heterostructures that achieved external quantum efficiencies of over 20% and internal quantum efficiencies of almost 100%.

Scientists from several universities in Japan have created a simple method for controlling the introduction of defects, called ‘vacancy layers’, into perovskite oxynitrides, leading to changes in their physical properties. The approach, reportedly stumbled upon by chance, could help in the development of photocatalysts.

Oxynitrides are inorganic compounds formed of oxygen, nitrogen, and other chemical elements. They have gained much attention in recent years because of their interesting properties, with applications in optical and memory devices, and in photocatalytic reactions, for example.

Organic-inorganic hybrid perovskites (OIHPs) have great potential for various applications like solar cells, lighting-emitting diodes (LEDs), field effect transistors (FETs) and photodetectors. Among their most important parameters influencing the power conversion efficiency (PCE) of devices based on perovskite materials is their carrier mobility. However, despite massive progress made by introducing new components into the structure to control the mobility of the carriers, the understanding on the atom level of how the components affect the performance is still lacking.

To address this problem, a research team led by Prof. Luo Yi and Prof. Ye Shuji from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) has synthesized a series of 2D OHIPs films with large organic spacer cations.

Researchers from the University of Cambridge, Imperial College London and Soochow University in China have discovered that unique lead-free perovskite materials could be useful for indoor light harvesting. The team has found that these environmentally friendly materials could harvest enough energy from indoor light to power wireless smart devices.

A novel way to power the multitude of electronic devices we use daily is by converting indoor light from ordinary bulbs into energy, in a similar way to how solar panels harvest energy from sunlight. However, due to the different properties of the light sources, the materials used for solar panels are usually not suitable for harvesting indoor light.

A research team, led by Professor Lioz Etgar at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel, has developed a screen-printed three-layered all-nanoparticle network as a rigid framework for perovskites. This new design, that facilitates the removal and replacement of degraded perovskite in a solar cell, could open the door to recycling PSCs and thus making their market insertion a much safer, "greener" process.

This matrix reportedly enables perovskites to percolate and form a complementary photoactive network. Two porous conductive oxide layers, separated by a porous insulator, serve as a chemically stable substrate for the cells.