Perovskites (PP2.3)

PP2.3 Perovskites

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Investigators: Anita Ho-Baillie (USYD), Klaus Weber (ANU), Thomas White (ANU), Doojin Vak (CSIRO), Jacek Jasieniak (Monash), Udo Bach (Monash), Prof. Paul Burn (UQ), Dr Paul Shaw (UQ), Xiaojing Hao (UNSW) and Martin Green (UNSW)

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Aims and objectives

 

This work package will build on ACAP’s existing leadership in perovskite solar cell research to enhance their performance both in terms of power conversion efficiency and stability. Efforts will focus on i) improving the external radiative efficiency by one order of magnitude above that of the current state of the art and ii) demonstrating single junction perovskite cells with bandgap close to the ideal and power conversion efficiencies exceeding 27%.

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For the more thermally-stable, inorganic-perovskite cells, research will focus on improving carrier lifetimes towards 10 µs, reducing surface recombination velocities (towards 103 cm/s) for demonstrating 22% 1.72eV bandgap cells, 19.0% 1.90eV cells and 16.6%, 2.05eV cells.

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In terms of stability our goal is to develop flat-plate encapsulated cells that pass the full IEC 61215 standard tests and stable flexible encapsulated cells with power-to-weight ratios towards 30 W/g.

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These advances in perovskites will be harnessed within tandem cells (PP3) and various emerging applications (PP6).

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Background

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Since the emergence of perovskite solar cells more than a decade ago, there has not been any slowdown in their research and development activities. Indeed, recent progress has been fuelled by increasing public and private sector funding

 

[1]. Perovskites exhibit many alluring photovoltaic attributes, including i) high power output with respective to weight ii) flexibility, iii) ease of fabrication by solution processes, and iv) tunable bandgaps, creating significant interest in the potential for low-cost and high performing next generation photovoltaic technologies.

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To achieve a respectable, levelized cost of energy however, sufficient for manufacturers to invest in perovskite cell technology, both high efficiency and long operational lifetime are critically important. For that reason, research activities in ACAP will be focussed on achieving single junction durable and high-efficiency perovskite flat plate and flexible solar cells (which will be covered in this section, as well as their application in perovskite tandems, which will be covered in PP3.

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Analyses of various cell technologies reveal that the external radiative efficiencies (ERE), a measure of a solar cell’s effectiveness in absorption and radiation without non-radiative losses, is one order of magnitude lower than those of silicon and GaAs, the state of the art for terrestrial and space photovoltaics. Therefore, there is scope for efficiency improvement even for single junction perovskite cells which will one of the research themes in this work package

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PP 2.3.1 High Efficiency Hybrid and Inorganic Perovskite Solar Cells

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PP 2.3.2 Stable Perovskite Cells and Modules

 

PP 2.3.3 Low-Weight Low-Cost Flexible Perovskite Modules

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