Solliance has announced they have set a new record for a stabilised average cell performance of 14.5% for its large are thin-film perovskite photovoltaic modules on glass. The efficiency was measured on an aperture area of 144 cm2.
The perovskite module was realised on a commercial 6-inch x 6-inch glass substrate - a size comparable to standard commercial silicon solar cells.
The substrate is provided with a transparent conductor, by applying three consecutive slot die coating processes and by using a newly developed annealing process. The metal top electrode was evaporated.
Twenty-four cells were series-connected through optimised laser based scribes. Up to 95.3% of the modules area is covered with active material, resulting in a stabilised module efficiency of 13.8%.
Individual reference cells, spin coated and slot die coated, with the same device architecture showed cell performances of 14.5%. This is perfectly on par with the measured cell performance on the up-scaled modules. This means that only the interconnection area contributes to the observed performance loss from cell-to-module. In total 10 modules were produced and showed high stabilized module efficiency numbers, indicating this production process is capable of high yields.
These results demonstrate further the scalability of this new thin film PV technology. Apart from the electrodes currently used, all layers can be processed in ambient environment and at temperatures below 120⁰C, making expensive equipment obsolete. The deposition and interconnection technologies are industrially available for both Sheet-to-Sheet and Roll-to-Roll manufacturing (read related press release here). The latter allows creating high volume production of flexible and light-weight PV modules in the future.
"With our newly developed, industry compatible, large area coating and crystallisation processes, we were able to scale-up the active area of our solar cell devices with 3 orders of magnitude without any performance loss."
"At the same time, we are in the process of introducing a much more stable material stack into our large area deposition processes."
Francesco Di Giacomo, Senior scientist at Solliance Solar Research
"The challenge is to scale perovskite cells to larger size modules whilst keeping the efficiency high and the costs low at a high yield. The reported result, presented on an aperture area comparable to standard commercial silicon solar cells, shows that Solliance Solar Research, with its in depth know-how on processing of organic PV, CIGS and its vast pilot production infrastructure, is excellently placed to realize this upscaling."
"This 13.8% efficient perovskite based PV module is another important step in this development. Apart from the fact that we are confident to boost quickly the up-scaled Perovskite based PV module efficiency further above 15% we are also currently making good progress to stabilize the performance of these devices under real life operational conditions."
Ronn Andriessen, Director at Solliance Solar Research
About Solliance Solar Research
Solliance Solar Research is conducting advanced research on the development of perovskite based PV modules and its applications with its industrial partners Solartek, Greatcell Solar Limited and Shell in its Shared Research Program PSC.
With this result, the Solliance R&D partners and their industrial partners demonstrate the strength of their research framework for the development of industrial Perovskite based PV modules.
Source: Solliance Solar Research