The Perovskite-Info newsletter

NASA has announced that a small satellite, designed and built by Brown University students, will ride on a future rocket launch.

Image credit: Brown University

The new satellite, dubbed PVDX (Perovskite Visuals and Degradation eXperiment), is a cubesat — a class of miniature satellites ideal for doing low-cost science experiments or technology demonstration in space. Members of Brown Space Engineering (BSE), a student group, worked for three years to develop a mission plan and proposal for NASA’s Cubesat Launch Initiative, which uses auxiliary cargo space on rockets to send cubesats to space.

Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) have reported a breakthrough in energy-efficient phototransistors - devices that could someday help computers process visual information similarly to the human brain and be used as sensors in applications like self-driving vehicles.

The structures rely on metal-halide perovskites. Jeffrey Blackburn, a senior scientist at NREL and co-author of a new paper outlining the research, said: “In general, these perovskite semiconductors are a really unique functional system with potential benefits for a number of different technologies”. “NREL became interested in this material system for photovoltaics, but they have many properties that could be applied to whole different areas of science.”

Researchers at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) have produced perovskite solar modules with greatly reduced loss of efficiency due to scaling. The team reported an efficiency of 18% for a perovskite solar module with an area of ​​4cm² - a world record for vacuum-processed perovskite solar modules. To this end, they combined the series connection by laser with the vacuum processing of all layers of the solar cell.

"One of the main challenges is to transfer the efficiencies achieved on areas of a few square millimeters to typical solar module surfaces of a few hundred square centimeters," says Dr. Tobias Abzieher, who heads the development of perovskite solar cells deposited from a vacuum at the Light Technology Institute (LTI) of the KIT. Perovskite solar cells are often joined together to form large-area solar modules using the so-called monolithic series connection. For this purpose, structuring lines are introduced during the deposition of the individual layers of the solar cell, which causes the solar cell strips to be connected in series.

Researchers at UC Santa Barbara have discovered an important factor that limits the efficiency of perovskite solar cells.

Various possible defects in the lattice of hybrid perovskites had previously been considered as the potential cause of such limitations, but it was assumed that the organic molecules would remain intact. The team has now revealed that missing hydrogen atoms in these molecules can cause massive efficiency losses.