A Sunny Outlook for Solar: New Research Demonstrates Great Promise for Improving Solar Cell Efficiency - SciTechDaily

All-inorganic perovskites compare well with their hybrid counterparts in terms of efficiency.

New research demonstrates great promise of all-inorganic perovskite solar cells for improving the efficiencies of solar cells.

New research in the UC Santa Barbara materials department has shown not only that this assumption is incorrect, but also that all-inorganic materials have the potential for outperforming hybrid perovskites.

The findings are published in the article “All-inorganic halide perovskites as candidates for efficient solar cells,” which appears on the cover of the October 20, 2021, issue of the journal Cell Reports Physical Science.

“To compare the materials, we performed comprehensive simulations of the recombination mechanisms,” explained Xie Zhang, lead researcher on the study.

To compare inorganic and hybrid perovskites, the researchers studied two prototype materials.

Sorting out these processes experimentally is exceedingly difficult, but state-of-the-art quantum-mechanical calculations can accurately predict the recombination rates, thanks to new methodology that was developed in the group of UCSB materials professor Chris Van de Walle, who credited Mark Turiansky, a senior graduate student in the group, with helping to write the code to calculate the recombination rates.

Running the simulations showed that defects common to both materials give rise to comparable (and relatively benign) levels of recombination.

Mainly because it is more difficult to grow high-quality layers of the all-inorganic materials.

Still, the difficulty explains why the all-inorganic perovskites have not received as much attention to date.

Reference: “All-inorganic halide perovskites as candidates for efficient solar cells” by Xie Zhang, Mark E.

October 14, 2021

October 14, 2021

October 14, 2021