The new multi-joint material eliminates the problem of the potential soil consumption of large photovoltaic plants
Scientists at the University of Oxford’s Department of Physics have crossed the physical limit of solar panels, developing an ultra-thin perovskite photovoltaic material that does not require layers of silicon and can be applied to any everyday object, from backpacks to cars, from buildings to cell phones.
With the efficiency record set by LONGi Green Energy Technology, which, with its photovoltaic silicon perovskite tandem, has reached a conversion level of 33.9 per cent, the potential of perovskite is now clear. But the Oxford team’s research opens another path to this material, developing an incredibly thin and versatile solution.
Achieves a conversion efficiency of 27%
With a thickness of just over a micron, the new ultra-thin perovskite photovoltaic is 150 times less frequent than a silicon wafer. Potentially, the solution developed by Oxford would allow large photovoltaic plants to be abandoned in favour of smaller surfaces equally productive. Using a pioneering technique that stacks multiple absorbing layers into a single solar cell, scientists have exploited a wider range of the light spectrum, thereby generating more energy from the same amount of sunlight.
The multi-joint approach has now been independently certified by the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) in Japan, for the first time matching the efficiency performance of silicon mono-layered materials.
“During just five years experimenting with our stacking or multi-junction approach we have raised power conversion efficiency from around 6% to over 27%, close to the limits of what single-layer photovoltaics can achieve today,” said Dr Shuaifeng Hu, Post Doctoral Fellow at Oxford University Physics.
In short, this approach, if properly developed, could lead to the long-held theoretical limit of efficiency greater than 45%.
As Dr. Junke Wang of Marie Skłodowska Curie Actions Postdoc Fellow at Oxford University Physics pointed out, the new material can be applied as a coating to any surface, keeping energy performance unchanged, but offering incredible flexibility.
An ultra-thin perovskite photovoltaic applied to any object
As Dr. Junke Wang of Marie Skłodowska Curie Actions Postdoc Fellow at Oxford University Physics pointed out, the new material can be applied as a coating to any surface, keeping energy performance unchanged, but offering incredible flexibility.
“We can envisage perovskite coatings being applied to broader types of surface to generate cheap solar power, such as the roof of cars and buildings and even the backs of mobile phones. If more solar energy can be generated in this way, we can foresee less need in the longer term to use silicon panels or build more and more solar farms” Dr Wang added.
Commercial trial started
The new ultra-thin perovskite photovoltaic has great commercial potential, well grasped by Oxford PV, a spin-off of Oxford University Physics. Oxford PV has begun large-scale production of perovskite photovoltaics at its plant in Brandenburg-an-der-Havel, near Berlin, Germany. This is the world’s first series production line for tandem “perovskite-on-silicon” solar cells.
As stressed by the researchers themselves, you will have to wait a few more months to read the full research.