ACAP researchers shine at 53rd IEEE PV Specialists Conference in Montreal
- alisonpotter2
- Jun 13
- 6 min read
Updated: Jun 24
ACAP researchers including Professors Dan Macdonald (ANU), Dr Heping Shen (ANU) and Zhiwen Zheng (UNSW) are being recognised for their leadership and significant contributions at the 53rd IEEE Photovoltaic Specialists Conference (PVSC 53), being held in Montreal, Canada.
Organised by the IEEE Photonics Society and the IEEE Electron Devices Society, PVSC is the longest-running technical conference dedicated to photovoltaics, having been established in 1961. This is the first year that the conference has been held outside of the US. The conference is known for its rigorous peer-review process, ensuring high-quality presentations and proceedings. It also offers tutorials and plenary sessions led by leading experts in the field, providing attendees with opportunities to deepen their knowledge and engage with cutting-edge research.
Professor Dan Macdonald shares insights on the future of silicon solar cell technology
ACAP ANU Node Lead Professor Dan Macdonald gave a popular plenary presentation titled, “Towards 27% efficient silicon solar cells in mass production” discussing the current state and likely future direction of industrial silicon cells.
Professor Macdonald is a world-leading expert with over 25 years’ experience in the design, fabrication and characterisation of crystalline silicon solar cells, and has led multiple industry-supported projects on the commercialisation of high efficiency n-type cells.
Industrial silicon solar cells continue to improve in efficiency, with multiple reports of full-size cells above 26% in recent years, using both silicon heterojunction (SHJ) and doped polysilicon (TOPCon) technologies.
Professor Macdonald reviewed some of the key advances that have made this rapid progress possible, including improvements in silicon wafers, surface passivation, and low-recombination metallisation. He discussed in detail the relative advantages and disadvantages of SHJ and TOPCon technologies, both in terms of performance and cost. He explained:
PERC technology (the previous standard) is being replaced by more advanced designs: TOPCon, heterojunction (SHJ), and back-contact (BC) cells.
TOPCon is currently leading the industry due to lower manufacturing costs and easier processing compared to SHJ.
Back-contact (BC) cells offer higher efficiency but are more complex and costly to make – though hybrid BC cells, like those from LONGi, are breaking records.
Jinko Solar has achieved 26.7% efficiency using TOPCon, with room to improve.
Even in ideal conditions, silicon cells have a theoretical efficiency ceiling of around 29.5%, but real-world cells still fall 3 – 4% short due to light-trapping limits and the challenge of moving electrical charge efficiently. Macdonald discussed likely future directions, including alternative architectures, such as back contact cells, to enable over 27% efficient cells in mass production at low cost in the medium term.
Associate Professor Heping Shen wins prestigious Stuart R Wenham Young Professional Award
The Stuart R. Wenham Young Professional Award was presented to Associate Professor Heping Shen from the School of Engineering at the Australian National University.
Heping said, “This award not only recognises my impactful contributions to photovoltaics but also highlights ANU’s achievements and its long-standing international leadership in the PV field.”
After receiving the award, Shen presented her talk “Towards Cost-Effective Perovskite/Silicon Tandem Solar Cells” to a packed room.
“My presentation focused on next-generation tandem solar cells – technologies designed to surpass the efficiency limits of traditional single-junction silicon solar cells while further reducing the cost of solar electricity,” said Shen.
“I shared our recent progress in developing high-efficiency, low-cost tandem structures that are more scalable and stable, as well as the innovative tandem solar cell architectures, the world's simplest, pioneered by the ANU team. These innovations have contributed to speeding up the commercialisation of perovskite/silicon tandem solar cell technology and thereby the acceleration of the global transition to more affordable and sustainable solar energy.”
There was lively discussion during the Q&A session around innovative cell architectures, device stability, cost considerations and industrially relevant fabrication processes. Prof. David Mitzi (Duke University, USA), the recipient of the William R. Cherry Award, and other senior researchers in the field had high praise for Shen’s talk.
Researchers from UNSW's ACDC Group win multiple awards
Professor Ziv Hameiri's ACDC Research Group (UNSW) had a very successful conference taking home multiple awards. Dr Ali Shakiba, Dr Shuai Nie and Sijin Wang all took home Best Poster Awards for their presentations, while Zhiwen Zheng won the Best Student Presentation Award, and Gaia Maria Javier and Grace Lui were Finalists.
(The ACDC Research Group receives indirect funding and support from ACAP and direct funding through the ARENA-funded TRAC program.)
Zhiwen Zheng wins Best Student Presentation Award
Zhiwen Zheng (UNSW) won the Best Student Presentation Award for his presentation “Outdoor Photoluminescence Imaging of III-V Multijunction Solar Cells under Direct Sunlight”.
III-V multijunction cells are central to concentrated photovoltaics (CPV), but in-field inspection tools have lagged behind. Zheng explained that they demonstrated, for the first time, contactless outdoor PL imaging of these cells under direct concentrated sunlight. By optimising optical filters for each subcell, the researchers achieved high signal-to-noise ratios – opening the door to reliable, spatially resolved performance diagnostics for CPV systems in real-world conditions. This work was done in collaboration with Raygen.
Gaia Maria Javier (UNSW) was a Best Student Presentation Award Finalist for her presentation “Automated Analysis of Performance Losses in Solar Cells Using Explainable AI”.
Javier explained that production-scale datasets are vast and complex, making it difficult to pinpoint what drives efficiency losses. “We’ve developed a fully automated workflow that leverages machine learning to analyse cell measurements, then uses explainable artificial intelligence (AI) to identify the key parameters behind performance degradation.”
Grace Liu (UNSW) was a finalist for her presentation “Evaluating Statistical Degradation Rate Calculation Methods Using Current-Voltage Measurements of Fielded Modules.”
PV asset managers often rely on statistical methods (e.g., linear regression, year-over-year analysis) to estimate site degradation, but their accuracy has not been rigorously benchmarked. In the talk, Grace introduced “ground-truth” degradation datasets – both synthetic and real-world – and use them to show how popular statistical approaches perform in practice. Be ready for some surprising insights.
Further presentations
Professor Ziv Hameiri (UNSW) was an organising committee member for one of the symposia and UNSW SPREE’s Head of School Professor Gavin Conibeer presented on PV Education at UNSW.
Conibeer said, "The depth of the programs we offer and the wide range of cohorts we teach were seen as being very important for upskilling PV Engineers in Australia and worldwide." The presentation was part of a special industry session on "Human Capital for PV" and a white paper on PV Education with contributions from all the presenters in the session will be generated.
Conibeer said, "The session Chair, Arno Smets from TU Delft gave a great presentation on the on-line offerings from TU Delft on PV Education – these are particularly impressive as they have reached over 0.5M students, as compared to our 20,000 students. A mood of the session was that on-line platforms are certainly a highly impactful and important part of the education space, although they do need to be supported by the deep knowledge transfer available in full degree programs."
Anh Huy Tuan Le (UNSW) presented “Accelerating Regeneration of Silicon Solar Cells Impacted by Light- and Elevated Temperature-Induced Degradation under Field-Related Conditions”.
Light- and elevated temperature-induced degradation (LeTID) can significantly erode module performance in the field. The work introduces an advanced current-injection protocol – enabled by bi-directional inverter technology – that speeds up LeTID recovery.
Anh Huy Tuan Le said, “We present implementation guidelines for utility-scale PV plants and demonstrate the compelling economic benefits through a preliminary techno-economic analysis.”
Congratulations to all of the ACAP researchers for their stellar performance sharing knowledge and building global connections at PVSC 53.
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