Saturday, February 18, 2017

Advanced Composite Solar Cell Materials

The breakthrough of solar cell materials has been fabricated through perovskite method. This composite material is popular with the name of perovskite solar cells which has solar cell efficiency and cheaper than the usual method. The solar energy which is harvested from the materials has higher conversion. Interestingly, like others method, the materials of perovskite solar cells are composed from metal halide perovskites which could be considered as transitions metals.

One of the main challenge in energy issue is how to construct a sustainable energy. And the most prominent resource is the solar energy which can be harvested anytime we want. However, the scientists have met following issue since the efficiency of energy that is harvested is not high and expensive. The difficulties in constructing sustainable power plant is about the large scale fabrication.


Commonly, the solar cell was made from silicon which has four free electrons. However, silicon fabrication is considered as one the most dangerous method since the solar cell materials must be activated. Consequently, the researchers around the world have been trying to determine which materials are not hazard. And they suggested with the carbon which has similar characteristics with silicon. Nevertheless, the research of fabricating solar cells based carbon materials is being researched and it meets the previous challenge, the efficiency of energy that harvested.

Perovskite solar cells are currently researched in intensive ways. Quoting from paper written by Daipeng Guo et al., perovskite is a low-cost fabrication because it takes advantages from the organic-inorganic compounds such as alkyl and chloride. This solar cells material is considered of its excellent performance in optical and electrical properties particularly in broad light absorption, high charge mobility and tunable bandgap. As we know that the solar cells materials are designed exactly similar with semiconductor.

The perovskite structure was fabricated in three ways normally. In short, the first is mesoscopic layer which is prepared above the conductive oxide substrate. This substrate is a transparent material. The next step is the forming process by joining the n-type material which is in this study they used TiO2. This n-type material is a metal oxide semiconductor which is capable to do transporting or electron carrier. Eventually, the perovskite material is deposited on top of the n-type material. The most interesting fact according to this journal is the combination of conductive oxide substrate and electron transporting material because they are joined forming the compact layer. Subsequently, it produces p-type semiconductor which is organic and able to do transfer holes.

Based on this study, the fabricated device has shown interesting results. And one of them is the structure of NiO NS provides high porosity and large surface area which was the result of diffusion process between perovskite and the compact layer. As a result, the figures of photo-induced electron-hole pairs increased. This is one the properties of efficiency in solar cells materials. Furthermore, the perovskite solar cells materials were able to be designed by this group of researchers and it will affect the issue of energy particularly in harvesting sunlight into electricity.

*Nanosheet-based printable perovskite solar cells authorized by Daipeng Guo, Jiaguo Yu, Ke Fan, Haiyuan Zou, Bowen He.

Team APSCHOLARSHIPS: Master Students

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