Perovskite Panels: The Substitute To Silicon Panels

Silicon has been the go-to material for creating effective and efficient solar panels. Perovskite is plentiful and is easier to manufacture with fewer resources. With the rising costs and difficulty procuring silicon, perovskite is becoming a widespread solution for the future of solar panels.

In the past, perovskite’s efficiency as solar cells was inadequate. It lacked the efficiency needed to collect enough energy to power homes. In the years that followed, perovskite designs and testing yielded many results that showed its promising energy-collecting capabilities as a solar panel.

One of its major challenges today is to keep itself efficient and consistent. Perovskite is much more fragile than silicon, and a minor change can yield lower solar energy collected from the sun. Fortunately, more specialists and technologists continue to look into its efficacy as a silicon substitute, making it an efficient alternative to silicon in the future.

While we know that perovskite needs more research to fulfill its role as a silicon substitute, it has the potential to become a silicon substitute with more time and resources in the future.

Here’s an excerpt that talks about another breakthrough from scientists regarding perovskite’s solar cell usability, according to Tech Xplore.

Since 2009, scientists have suspected that perovskite films, which are a combination of organic and inorganic material, could be promising for solar panel construction. Perovskites are very thin films with a specific crystal structure that are very light and flexible, efficient, and cost effective, in comparison to silicon wafers.

However, current limitations, including how to prepare highly uniform perovskite films on a large scale, have prevented the commercialization of the perovskite solar cells.

Recently, researchers from the Qingdao Institute of Bioenergy and Bioprocess Technology (QIBEBT), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), described a new way of processing formamidinium-based perovskite film that relieves some of the limitations by using ammonia treatment to remove pore structures formed during the processing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5gmHaWDZTk

The study was published in Nature Communications on July 29.

“The highest power conversion efficiency of perovskite solar cells is comparable to that of widely commercialized silicon-based solar cells. However, how to achieve large-area preparation of highly uniform perovskite film remains a challenge,” said Prof. Pang Shuping from QIBEBT, the corresponding author of the study.

Methods and solvents used in processing perovskite films have been extensively studied, but these still require additional processing steps or materials to make perovskite films work. For instance, the extremely promising methylamine gas healing method is only suitable for methylammonium-based perovskite, but is not feasible for the more efficient formamidinium-based perovskite.

In order to find solutions to the gas healing of the formamidinium-based perovskite films, the researchers first studied the underlying reactions responsible for the challenges. “We have shown that the degradation of formamidinium-containing perovskites is caused by a reaction between the formamidinium cation and aliphatic amines, producing ammonia,” said Wang Xiao, the second author of the study.

In order to avoid the occurrence of side reactions, the researchers used ammonia instead of methylamine gas to treat formamidinium-based perovskite films. Base on this technology, the temperature is lowered so the perovskite film can absorb enough ammonia to transition the film into a flowable intermediate state. In this flowable state, imperfections and hole structures in the raw perovskite film can be healed. (Continue)

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