A chemical tweak to the production of perovskite solar cells reduces toxic waste from the process by 70%, new research finds. This greener production process could pave the way for scalable perovskite solar panel commercialization.
Perovskite solar cells are highly efficient at converting sunlight to electricity, making them a desirable technology for green energy generation. In the lab, their power conversion efficiency has grown from 3.8% in 2009 to a maximum of 25.5% in 2020, according to a publication in Progress in Photovoltaics. But the traditional production of these solar cells has not been so green. Perovskite solar cells are made by spin-coating a solution of perovskite and solvents over a substrate, and many of the ingredients in this solution are toxic: lead halide salts, ammonium salts, and an array of polar aprotic solvents.
Now, with the addition of a new co-solvent to the precursor solution, perovskite solar cells can be spin-coated with just a fraction of these toxic solids, while still maintaining the thickness of the final film, according to new research co-led by Aram Amassian, a professor of materials science and engineering at North Carolina State Univ. “What’s really remarkable is that you reduce the molarity of the solution by a factor of three, or in some...
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