Progress to Roll to Roll Mass Manufacturing of Perovskite Solar

Researchers at KAUST have developed a perovskite ink tailor-made for a roll to roll friendly mass manufacturing process called slot-die coating, producing PSCs that captured solar energy with high efficiency. The ink could also be coated onto silicon to create perovskite/silicon tandem solar cells.

High-throughput roll-to-roll fabrication would make printing solar cells in a similar process to printing newspapers.

Some of the best-performing spin-coated PSCs combine the perovskite with a poly(triarylamine) (PTAA) transport layer, but PTAA is hydrophobic and highly repellent to liquid perovskite ink. Adding a surfactant to the ink formulation overcame the repellence, resulting in better quality interface and films and better device performance, Subbiah says. The team also switched the ink to a lower-boiling solvent, reducing ink drying time without the need for further processing steps.

Optimized slot-die coated PSCs captured solar energy at 21.8 percent efficiency, a significant improvement over the 18.3 percent previously recorded for PSCs made this way.

The ink could readily be coated onto textured silicon to produce a perovskite/silicon tandem solar cell. The frstslot-die coated silicon-perovskite monolithic tandem solar cell had a 23.8 percent efficiency.

“The development of scalable deposition techniques for perovskite solar cells is essential to bring this technology from the research labs to the market,” De Wolf says. “Our next steps are making large-area devices and modules using our developed technology and testing their stability in the lab and the outdoors, while continuing to improve performance.”

The University of Washington and many others are working on roll-to-roll solar cell production.

Newspaper-like roll to roll printing is the goal for printing solar power.

Separate Research is Making Perovskite Solar More Durable

Researchers at Soochow University clarified the factors influencing the degradation and they summarized some feasible approaches for durable perovskite photovoltaics.

SOURCES – Soochow University, University of Washington, KAUST
Written By Brian Wang, Nextbigfuture.com

15 thoughts on “Progress to Roll to Roll Mass Manufacturing of Perovskite Solar”

  1. Throw enough time, brains and money at something, and it'll get solved.

    Fusion wants to talk to you. It's set up a zoom meeting with the philosophers stone and perpetual motion.

  2. Not really true. If it is expensive then it better be very effective. A smart bomb because of its effectiveness is worth hundreds of dumb bombs. But if all you want is for the enemy to keep his head down and not move then cheap bullets are a winner.

  3. Perovskite photovoltaic devices degrade and decompose under influence of moisture and oxygen. That problem is of less concern on Mars at most locations. Of course, there may some some other martian chemicals that cause problems too. They should attach some perovskite solar cells on the next rover and follow up the results.

  4. I've been following the progress of perovskite solar for some time. The problem is stability. So far, perovskite solar cells degrade quite rapidly, too rapidly.

    However, I may have missed something, because there have been announcements of perovskite-over-silicon tandem cells becoming(?) commercially available. It's hard to imagine that happening without at least a partial solution to the stability issue.

    Anyone have information on this issue?

  5. Well put on production vs performance.
    Cost is relevant to the arms industry, but having had to use low end examples of big ticket items like warships (look up Zumwalt's High-Low mix) spend the money on the best tools for the job.
    Second place in a war loses and you're more likely to be one of the ones who ends up dead. You go to war with the weapons you have, it's too late to decide to spend the money once the bullets and missiles are in flight.

  6. OK, but tandem cells do work so I guess that is not a problem in reality? Perhaps you get some "average" current at the "average" voltage in a tandem cell?

  7. It's more than that: if it can't be mass produced at an acceptable cost vs performance ratio then it's useless, except maybe for the arms industry where cost is largely irrelevant it seems.

  8. The problem I see with tandem cells, is how do you get the same amount of current through both layers? Even if you can precisely control bandgap in layers, the "color" of sunlight is not always the same. The higher the sun in the sky, the more ultraviolet comes through the atmosphere, and the higher the current from the higher bandgap layer.
    If the current from all layers is not the same, efficiency suffers, as it does when one cell in a panel is shaded.

  9. Breakthroughs in manufacturing processes don't often get headlines, but are arguably more critical to technology adoption than the original research.

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