Supersizing Perovskite Solar Cells

The PV upscaling team at SPECIFIC has been working hard in the last year and finally their efforts have been recognised. Their paper, “All printable perovskite solar modules with 198 cm² active area and over 6% efficiency” has been accepted in Advanced Materials Technologies and has been published online.

A breakthrough in perovskite solar cell scale-up is reported with the creation of the largest perovskite module published thus far in the academic literature. This work is the culmination of the team’s research effort in the drive towards a fully printed series connected perovskite module at a sensible industrial scale. The device structure chosen to explore scale-up is that of the Carbon Perovskite Solar Cell (C-PSC), a sequentially deposited triple mesoscopic layering of titania, zirconia and carbon with perovskite subsequently infiltrated.

The C-PSC has been described recently as being the likely front runner to the market [Chen, H., & Yang, S. (2017). Carbon‐Based Perovskite Solar Cells without Hole Transport Materials: The Front Runner to the Market?. Advanced materials, 29(24), 1603994] for both simple, low-cost manufacture, and outstanding stability, having already demonstrated one year of continuous light soaking [Grancini, G., Roldán-Carmona, C., … & Nazeeruddin, M. K. (2017). One-Year stable perovskite solar cells by 2D/3D interface engineering. Nature communications, 8, 15684].

This paper addresses the challenge of transitioning this device stack from small scale lab devices (1 cm² of active area) to large area A4 sized modules using screen printing processes, optimised to avoid defects caused by printing such large areas, and describes how series interconnections can be achieved through accurate layer registration and how the patterning of the blocking layer can deliver significant improvement on device performance. The resulting module with an efficiency of 6.3% (stabilised) is world leading for a device of this size. Equally impressive is the low light performance with 11% and 18% PCE achieved respectively at 200 and 1000 lux under fluorescent lighting (usual indoor illumination level in living rooms and hypermarkets, respectively). It is hoped that this demonstration of good performance on large area can unlock the viability of perovskite solar cells manufactured on an industrial scale.