Major advance in solar cells made from cheap, easy-to-use perovskite

Berkeley News ^ | NOVEMBER 7, 2016 | Robert Sanders

[aquila48]

Solar cells made from an inexpensive and increasingly popular material called perovskite can more efficiently turn sunlight into electricity using a new technique to sandwich two types of perovskite into a single photovoltaic cell.

Perovskite solar cells are made of a mix of organic molecules and inorganic elements that together capture light and convert it into electricity, just like today’s more common silicon-based solar cells. Perovskite photovoltaic devices, however, can be made more easily and cheaply than silicon and on a flexible rather than rigid substrate. The first perovskite solar cells could go on the market next year, and some have been reported to capture 20 percent of the sun’s energy.

In a paper appearing online today in advance of publication in the journal Nature Materials, University of California, Berkeley, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory scientists report a new design that already achieves an average steady-state efficiency of 18.4 percent, with a high of 21.7 percent and a peak efficiency of 26 percent.

“We have set the record now for different parameters of perovskite solar cells, including the efficiency,” said senior author Alex Zettl, a UC Berkeley professor of physics, senior faculty member at Berkeley Lab and member of the Kavli Energy Nanosciences Institute. “The efficiency is higher than any other perovskite cell – 21.7 percent – which is a phenomenal number, considering we are at the beginning of optimizing this.”

“This has a great potential to be the cheapest photovoltaic on the market, plugging into any home solar system,” said Onur Ergen, the lead author of the paper and a UC Berkeley physics graduate student.

[RegulatorCountry]

Ah, stupid auto-correct, or maybe it’s me for leaving it on.

Multlane = multizone

[nathanbedford]

Thanks for the education, and the photo.

I guess I had always thought that the difference between silicone and silicon was simply a matter of regional pronunciation. I refer to the pronunciation because I dictate my replies and I simply dictated "silicone" and kept blithely on ignorant of what I was missing out on.

[TXnMA]

You're welcome -- but, as I said, I was mostly trying to lighten up an otherwise blah MLK Day...

~~~~~~~~~~

However, I must admit that one of my patents involved mounting a micromachined silicon pressure sensor chip with screen-printed siliconE rubber -- onto an alumina ceramic substrate with thin film aluminum metal conductors on it.

With my Texian drawl, my presentations on the subject were so confusing that I adopted the British "aluminIum" pronunciation for the metal -- and borrowed my Massachusetts colleages' "twang" for the semiconductor -- and pronounced it as they did: "silicAHn".

~~~~~~~~~

But I bailed out of MA -- back to God's Country -- before I started

"...driving my HondER AccAHd to a pAHty -- where I pAHked my cAH. in the yAHd..."

LOL!!

[TXnMA]

FReepMail for you...

[theBuckwheat]

A solar flare induces a distinctly different pulse in wiring than does the EMP from a chemical or nuclear explosion. The rise time of the voltage induced by a solar event would be so slow that normal diodes could protect a PV solar cell from damage.