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takyon writes:

Crystal structure discovered almost 200 years ago could hold key to solar cell revolution (SD)

The study in Science, led by researchers at the University of Oxford, revealed that a molecular additive -- a salt based on the organic compound piperidine -- greatly improves the longevity of perovskite solar cells.

[...] One path to the marketplace is a tandem cell made of both silicon and perovskites that could turn more of sunlight's spectrum into energy. Lab tests on tandem cells have produced efficiencies of 28%, and efficiencies in the mid-30s seem realistic, Labram said.

"Tandem cells might allow solar panel producers to offer a performance beyond anything silicon alone might achieve," he said. "The dual approach could help remove the barrier to perovskites entering the market, on the way to perovskites eventually acting as stand-alone cells."

Journal Reference:
Yen-Hung Lin, Nobuya Sakai, Peimei Da, et al. A piperidinium salt stabilizes efficient metal-halide perovskite solar cells [$], Science (DOI: 10.1126/science.aba1628)

Longevity has been a long-standing concern for hybrid perovskite photovoltaics. We demonstrate high-resilience positive-intrinsic-negative perovskite solar cells by incorporating a piperidinium-based ionic compound into the formamidinium-cesium lead-trihalide perovskite absorber. With the bandgap tuned to be well suited for perovskite-on-silicon tandem cells, this piperidinium additive enhances the open-circuit voltage and cell efficiency. This additive also retards compositional segregation into impurity phases and pinhole formation in the perovskite absorber layer during aggressive aging. Under full-spectrum simulated sunlight in ambient atmosphere, our unencapsulated and encapsulated cells retain 80 and 95% of their peak and post-burn-in efficiencies for 1010 and 1200 hours at 60° and 85°C, respectively. Our analysis reveals detailed degradation routes that contribute to the failure of aged cells.

Original Submission