By Frank Andorka, Senior Correspondent
People are looking for the next big technical innovation that will revolutionize solar cells and, for the past several years, perovskites have been “the next big thing.”
Perovskite is a mineral that has been shown to have significantly higher efficiencies than polycrystalline silicon. The problems were twofold:
1) The width of the perovskite film necessary to see the efficiency jumps had yet to be determined; and
2) The cost of commercialization was still prohibitive.
But thanks to recent research out of the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, both of those problems may be one step closer to being solved. And once they are, the commercialization of perovskite solar cells will be one step closer to reality.
The key lies, according to researchers, in how the perovskite solar cells are made. To wit:
To make the new cells, the researchers coated transparent conductive substrates with perovskite films that absorb sunlight very efficiently. They used a gas-solid reaction-based technique in which the substrate is first coated with a layer of hydrogen lead triiodide incorporated with a small amount of chlorine ions and methylamine gas – allowing them to reproducibly make large uniform panels, each consisting of multiple solar cells.
In developing the method, the scientists realized that making the perovskite layer 1 micron thick increased the working life of the solar cell significantly.
The thicker layer improved both the stability of the solar cell – researchers claim the cells were completely unchanged even after 800 hours of use – but also allowed the cell to be reproduced more efficiently which, as they note, is critical to mass commercialization.
Everyone is wondering where the next big breakthrough in solar cell technology is going to come from, and while perovskites still aren’t there yet, this latest research suggests they’re closer than ever before. And that news should excite everyone.
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