Dear Fabio,

welcome!

The most promising material as active layer is the perovskites. There intensive research work to overcome its shortcomings as the low stability and the the inclusion of lead Pb. The stability has been much improved by enhancing the material preparation methods and using metal oxide hole and electron transport layers which help also to seal the perovskite from the environmental effects.

May be the other material which is indispensable is the silicon. There is now new structures of silicon solar cells which much reduce the fabrication cost of the solar cells and use much less silicon of the socalled solar grade quality.

One type of such cells is the heavily doped microstructure silicon solar cells.

For more details please follow the link: Article Performance Enhancement of a Proposed Solar Cell Microstruct...

Such cell type will be relatively cheap, have high efficiency and do not suffer from any instability and it is environment fiendly.

May be the other silicon solar cell structure is the HIT solar cell, that is composed of a mono thin crystalline silicon wafer surrounded by ultra-thin amorphous silicon layers. The acronym HIT stands for "heterojunction with intrinsic thin layer"

Such two types of new structure silicon solar cells will sustain silicon to to be the old new material for a long time.

My respected colleges i would like that to pay attention the heavily doped silicon solar cells as a promising material

Best wishes

Dear Dr. Fabio Nunes,

I believe the importance of nanostructured and composite materials has shown, from researches, to resolve the issues surrounding energy from generation to storage is evident in the following, interesting paper:

-Prospects of nanostructured composite materials for energy harvesting and storage

Idowu D. Ibrahim, Emmanuel R. Sadiku, Tamba Jamiru, Yskandar Hamam, Yasser Alayli, Azunna A. Eze

Journal of King Saud University – Science , Volume 32, Issue 1, Pages 758-764 (2020)

Available at: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1018364718309194

Best regards, Pierluigi Traverso

The Solar Cells based in Perovskites are one of the novel alternatives to enhance the Energy Conversion Efficiency.

Dear Mr. Pierluigi Traverso,

Thank you for your reply. The paper is well and very relevant.

This issue is the future!

Regards, Fabio

Dear Mr. Franklin Uriel Parás Hernández,

Thank you for your reply.

Perovskites are great material. However, I have been reading that the durability and water absorption are challenges for these materials.

Regards, Fabio

Perovskite solar cells have been found to be as much as 28% efficient. But there are major obstacles to using these materials commercially: The materials are not stable, and they contain water-soluble lead, which is a health hazard.

Dear Fabio Nunes :

To be honest, I know very little about Perovskites, clearly much less of what I would like to.

Perovskites-based solar cells use a Perovskite for the fabrication of one of the layers of the solar cell's structure, typically, it is used to grow the layer of the intrinsic semiconductor between the Holes transport Layer and the Electrons transport Layer.

Moreover, to fabricate this Layer based in a particular Perovskite, a few stages of synthesis are involved, i. e. this layer is not grown on an individual synthesis process. This is because that for late stages of the process you need to make react molecules in the previous deposited layers with the next chemical environment, this could be with a stage of spin coating or immersing the film into a wet solution, or maybe exposing the film to an annealing process.

So, as you well say, there is a part of the whole process of synthesis, in where the material is degradated so fast, (a matter of less than seconds), the structure of the Perovskite turns unstable and the organic molecule evaporates, in other words, the structure is not stable at normal room conditions in the Lab (as far as I have seen from the experiments of my lab mates).

So these couple of stages of the process need to be done in a controlled atmosphere environment, so this way the Perovskite as a final structure can stay stable.

I imagine this is a big challenge for the viability and practicability for its broad use in solar panels and its commercialization

However, I'm sure people working in this field, soon are going to be able to make progress in the challenges involved.

Regards ! :)

Dear Fabio,

welcome!

The most promising material as active layer is the perovskites. There intensive research work to overcome its shortcomings as the low stability and the the inclusion of lead Pb. The stability has been much improved by enhancing the material preparation methods and using metal oxide hole and electron transport layers which help also to seal the perovskite from the environmental effects.

May be the other material which is indispensable is the silicon. There is now new structures of silicon solar cells which much reduce the fabrication cost of the solar cells and use much less silicon of the socalled solar grade quality.

One type of such cells is the heavily doped microstructure silicon solar cells.

For more details please follow the link: Article Performance Enhancement of a Proposed Solar Cell Microstruct...

Such cell type will be relatively cheap, have high efficiency and do not suffer from any instability and it is environment fiendly.

May be the other silicon solar cell structure is the HIT solar cell, that is composed of a mono thin crystalline silicon wafer surrounded by ultra-thin amorphous silicon layers. The acronym HIT stands for "heterojunction with intrinsic thin layer"

Such two types of new structure silicon solar cells will sustain silicon to to be the old new material for a long time.

My respected colleges i would like that to pay attention the heavily doped silicon solar cells as a promising material

Best wishes

Dear Mr. Abdelhalim abdelnaby Zekry

Thank you very much for your cooperation. It is an interesting study on this issue. I agree with you.

Best regards, Fabio

As I got some ideas from your discussions about an important subject , I have some inquiry questions:

(1) What is the mechanism of improving this perovskite solar cell?

(2) What about the combination both of silicon and perovskite?

(3) which best method of preparation for massive cells?y

thanks

Dear Fabio Nunes

and other active researchers.

Actually, Metal halide perovskites possess unique features that make them useful for solar cell applications.

The raw materials used, and the possible fabrication methods (such as various printing techniques) are both low cost. Their high absorption coefficient enables ultrathin films of around 500 nm to absorb the complete visible solar spectrum.

These features combined result in the possibility to create low cost, high efficiency, thin, lightweight and flexible solar modules.

Perovskite solar cells have found use in powering low-power wireless electronics for the ambient powered internet of things applications.

Hope you understand about my answer.

Thanks.

dear fabio

im actually working on double perovskite (state of the art A2BB'X6) and recommend these materials due to variation of their composition and easy band tunning...

i think the future of PV technology belongs to tandem solar cells...

silicon+perovskite

Dear Mr. Nelaturi V Raghavaiah,

Thank you for your reply.

Best regards, Fabio

Dear Fabio Nunes

Some particular types of MXenes can be the best alternative in this regard. Please read the following articles for more information:

Article The Rise of MXenes

Article MXene–2D layered electrode materials for energy storage

https://nano.materials.drexel.edu/research/synthesis-of-nanomaterials/mxenes/

Dear Fabio,

To better answer your question, the motivation behind is quite important. Are you looking for commercial applications or R&D programs?

I appreciated your comment about the durability & reliability of Perovskiye based solar cells. I think is still an issue too even if some companies are claiming that this problem is "solved" (Oxford PV) BUT... let see how commercial products (read mass production, not prototypes) will behave and at what cost (real life conditions...not lab conditions).

Crystalline silicon is really proven to give consistent results and there are still good potential for efficiencies increase in production conditions (see solutions "à la" smartwire for interconnection improvements, lower usage of costly materials like silver, thinner glass as front cover, specialty encapsulants (with optimized (busting) optical performance, and so on. Be are that the efficiency, being a very important factor IS NOT THE ONLY ONE in the final cost of energy balance. Durability and reliability as as import! And here there is some work to be done while improving reliability and diurability and cost improvement of the PV mdule.... and, keep always in mind that the PV module accounts today of about 30% of the TOTAL system cost....

Hope that this help somehow your points...

I quite agree with Abdelhalim Zekry

Ivan Sinicco's answer has a point! Even before searching for answers, you may want to ask yourself "why" you need a new PV material.

Some have mentioned perovskite materials, but those have emerged more than 5 years ago. Perovskite is indeed a HOT material system but no longer considered a NEW material! Of course, there are lots of unknowns to further investigate and technical challenges to overcome for perovskite material system. But it does not mean that Perovskite is new ...

Theoreticians are good at hunting new PV materials. Alex Zunger could be a good example! Then, experimentalists including crystal growers investigate those new proposed materials. Some of which may turn out very difficult to realize (based on typical crystal growth techniques, availability of source/target materials etc ...). Even if it is do-able to synthesize the new materials, there are lots of things for devices engineers to do. If you look the famous NREL PV efficiency chart, you will find more and more materials came into the PV battlefield over the past 15 years or so. But the truth is that there are a lot more materials that could not even appear on this chart (such as FeS2, SnS, ...).

As Ivan Sinicco pointed out, if you are looking for new PV materials for R&D efforts (including funding opportunity), you may want to check recent publications from Alex Zunger (Univ. of Colorado), Clas Persson (Univ. of Oslo), David Mitzi (Duke Univ.), ... UNLESS you are considering new materials for high-efficiency III-V multifunction solar cells.

For commercial applications, in my opinion, reduction of manufacturing cost and increase of device lifetime may be more important than investigation of new materials. As some others have mentioned, there is an increasing interest in tandem-cell concept such as Perovskite/Si and Perovskite/CIGS. But I would say that it is rather new device concept (using known materials) than new material ...

I just wanted you to think about your question in a different angle.

Dear Ivan Sinicco and Sukgeun Choi

First of all, I want to thank you for your contributions.

My question was directed for research purposes even, not necessarily for commercial applications. I liked the point of view you brought.

I think it's important that we align cost x material to succeed in this mission.

Besides, there is the environmental aspect involved, which we should always consider.

Best regards, Fabio