Publication date: 18th August 2023
The hybrid perovskite solar cells attracted great interest as key materials for next-generation photovoltaic technologies, being the fastest-growing photovoltaic technology during the last decade. The obtained high performance and the low manufacturing costs make perovskite the ideal candidate for large-scale production of modules and panels, once the key issues, related to scaling the device area, have been solved.
We demonstrate that by using printing processes, laser patterning and interface engineering (IE), we are able to scale up from small area solar cells to large modules [3] and panels up to a dimension of 0.5 m2. Specific efforts have been devoted to optimizing the perovskite device structure considering interface and band alignments between layers composing the cells, to control the charge transfer at the interfaces by reducing losses and retaining the overall electrical performances of the device.
We demonstrated that tuning of interface properties can be successfully obtained by applying two-dimensional (2D) materials, [1] such as graphene, functionalized MoS2, MXenes[2] as well as 2D perovskite. as intra and inter layers in a mesoscopic architecture. The proposed approach has led to a production of modules on 121 cm2 substrates (11 x11 cm2) and up to 210 cm2 (14.5 x14.5 cm2) substrates with active area efficiency of 17.2% and 14.7%, respectively.[4]
Finally, a realization of a stand-alone solar farm infrastructure composed by nine panels, for a total panel area of 4.5 m2,[5] irrefutably extends the 2D materials-perovskite photovoltaic technology to industrial exploitation.