This report discusses the project results and lessons learnt to date for the ANU Project, Development of Stable Electrodes for Perovskite Solar Cells.
Report extract
The aim of this project is to design and demonstrate ‘tandem’ solar cells using processes and methods that can easily be transferred to manufacturing. In a tandem solar cell, two cells made of different materials are stacked on top of each other, so that each cell only absorbs a certain portion of the solar spectrum – the top cell absorbs (and converts to electricity) the ‘blue’ part of the solar spectrum, while the bottom cell absorbs the red part. In this way, higher conversion efficiency of sunlight to electricity can be achieved than using a single solar cell alone. Solar cells based on perovskite and silicon materials for the top and bottom cell, respectively, are very attractive due to their potentially low cost.
To date, most of the work on such perovskite-silicon tandem cells has used special, laboratory-type silicon wafers, rather than the much cheaper, commercial wafers used by solar cell manufacturers. An important step towards commercial application is the design and demonstration of high-efficiency tandem cells that use such commercial wafers. This is what this project sets out to do.
