The Perovskite-Info newsletter (August 3, 2021)

Philipp Tockhorn from Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin (HZB) recently presented his team's work at the virtual OSA Advanced Photonics Congress (July 26th to 30th, 2021). In this new work, the researchers used simulation and experiments to illustrate that introducing a small nanoscale texturing on the surface of materials in perovskite or silicon tandem solar cells can raise the efficiency above 29%, by decreasing the amount of light energy lost by reflection.

The researchers presented nanotextured perovskite/silicon tandem solar cells that are on par with the best cells presented to date. These findings may contribute to the further development of highly efficient perovskite/silicon tandem solar cells and have the potential to further decrease the cost of solar electricity.

Researchers from Korea and Vietnam have developed and designed a bifacial four-terminal perovskite/crystalline silicon heterojunction tandem solar cell configuration albedo reflection in which the c-Si HJ bottom sub-cell absorbs the solar spectrum from both the front and rear sides (reflected light from the background such as green grass, white sand, red brick, roofing shingle, snow, etc.).

This approach reportedly achieved an outstanding conversion efficiency exceeding 30%, higher than those of both the top and bottom sub-cells. Notably, this efficiency is also greater than the Schockley–Quiesser limit of the c-Si solar cell (approximately 29.43%). The proposed approach has the potential to lower industrial solar cell production costs in the near future.