Perovskite improves the efficiency of a silicon solar cell. Free Technical Library News

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Perovskite Improves Silicon Solar Cell Efficiency

07.03.2020

Researchers at Colorado State University (CU Boulder) have created a low-cost solar cell with some of the highest power conversion efficiency available today using a combination of silicon and perovskite layers.

"We've taken a product that's responsible for a $30 billion a year industry and made it 30% better," said Michael McGehee, professor in the CU Boulder Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering and co-author of a paper on the development. published in the journal Science.

The scientists placed a layer of a perovskite solar cell on top of a silicon counterpart, which captures lower-energy photons from the infrared part of the spectrum. The intrinsic efficiency of the silicon element was 21%, but the addition of perovskite improved it by about a third, to 27%.

The concept of multijunction or tandem solar cells has been known for about half a century, and the world record for efficiency achieved with its application is more than 45%. However, the cost of such record-breaking panels - $80 per square meter - makes the prospects for their widespread use unrealistic.

The use of halide perovskite makes it possible to reduce the cost of a layered solar cell by more than two orders of magnitude. The unique composition of the perovskite crystal - a precisely adjusted ratio of bromine, iodine and chlorine, providing the best combination of efficiency and stability - is the result of research that has stretched over the past decade.

Such perovskites are easy to synthesize even under laboratory conditions. In tests over 1000 hours or almost 42 days, the new tandem elements showed minimal change in original efficiency.

Professor McGee believes that exceeding the maximum efficiency of a silicon solar cell does not exhaust the full potential of the broadband multilayer structures developed by his group.

"We think they can break the 30% efficiency threshold and still be stable," he says.

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