Perovskite miracle material for solar cell
Perovskite is hailed as the miracle material responsible for such a breakthrough. Helmholtz Zentrum researchers in Berlin, Germany announced on December 19th 2022 that a world record had been broken by achieving a tandem solar cell efficiency of 32.5%.
This has been hailed by scientists as representing a really big leap in developments for renewable energy. A perovskite / silicon tandem solar cell was responsible for the record breaking efficiency in the solar cells fields.
Helmholtz have recently been one of the driving been one of the driving forces. The efficiency and lifetime of hybrid organic-inorganic perovskite solar cells speed the commercialisation of perovskite solar tech and decrease manufacturing costs.
Halide perovskites are a family of materials that have shown potential for high performance and low production costs in solar cells. Perovskites can be tuned to respond to different colours in the solar spectrum by changing the material composition.
A variety of formulations have demonstrated high performance. This flexibility allows perovskites to be combined with another, differently tuned absorber material to deliver more power form the same device.
The name of perovskite comes from the nickname for their types of non-halide perovskites such as oxides and nitrides are utilised in other energy tech such as fuel cells and catalysts.
Astounding efficiency of 32.5% for solar cell
The current industry standard for solar cells is the manufacture of them using silicon. Because it’s durable, low cost and have outstanding efficiency, but perovskite is soon set to outclass the standard silicon solar cell.
However combine these two excellent materials together and a whole new standard of efficiency can be achieved, because it would appear that both materials can each specialise in an unique role.
https://www.helmholtz-berlin.de
Perovskite seems to be better when reacting with blue light, and silicon is more focused on red and infrared light. The new devices developed by Helmholtz are made from both perovskite and silicon combined.
Top cells made of many thin layers of perovskite, and the bottom cell made from thin layers of silicon. This series of layers allows for better light filtering.
Such combination minimises electrical losses, and therefore increased efficiency by way of an innovative new interface built by the team. So this perovskite and silicon tandem cell is able to achieve an astounding efficiency of 32.5%.
It’s been independently verified as a record. It represents currently the highest emerging photovoltaic technology as measured by the National Renewable Energy Lab(NREL).
The previous record holding level was 31.25% just a few months before and 12months ago it was almost 30%. It’s clear that his latest big leap represents a new push for the technology into a pioneering new journey.
Professor Bernd Rech, scientifIc director of HZB(Helmholtz Zentrum Berlin) talked about the achievement: “At 32.5%, the solar cell efficiency of the HZB tandems is now ranges previously only achieved by expensive III/V semiconductors.”
“The NREL graph clearly shows how specular the last two increases from EDPL(European Data Protection Law) and HLB really are.”
Combination of perovskite and silicon has issues
Early perovskite devices degraded rapidly, becoming non-functional within minutes or hours. Now multiple research groups have demonstrated lifetimes of several months of operation. For commercial, grid-level electricity production is at least 20 years and preferably more than 30 years.
Lap scale perovskite devices are not easy to scale up, but there are significant efforts to apply scalable approaches to perovskite fabrication. For thin-film tech, these can be split into two major production types. sheet to sheet, roll-to-roll.
Additional barriers to commercialisation are the potential environmental impacts of perovskite as PV(PhotoVoltaic) materials, which are primarily lead-based.
As such, alternative materials are being studied to evaluate, reduce, mitigate and potentially eliminate toxicity and environmental concerns.
Source: Helmholtz Zentrum Berlin
