UW chemical engineering professor Hugh Hillhouse says "solar cells absorb light and turn it into electricity, but the best solar cell materials are also great at emitting light.
In fact, typically the more efficiently they emit light, the more voltage they generate.
" What did they do: They chemically treated lead-halide perovskite, through a process known as "surface passivation," which treats imperfections and reduces the likelihood that the absorbed photons will end up wasted rather than converted to useful energy. They experimented with a variety of chemicals for surface passivation before finding one, an organic compound known by its acronym TOPO, that boosted perovskite performance to levels approaching the best gallium arsenide semiconductors By fitting the emission spectra to a theoretical model, they showed that these materials could generate voltages 97 percent of the theoretical maximum, equal to the world record gallium arsenide solar cell and much higher than record silicon cells that only reach 84 percent. These improvements in material quality are theoretically predicted to enable the light-to-electricity power conversion efficiency to reach 27.9 percent under regular sunlight levels, which would push the perovskite-based photovoltaic record past the best silicon devices.
Gold, titanium, palladium or a silica compound is used as a back-reflector surface to test perovskite performance.
Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2018-07-boost-quality-perovskites.html#jCp
More information: Ian L. Braly et al. Hybrid perovskite films approaching the radiative limit with over 90% photoluminescence quantum efficiency, Nature Photonics (2018). DOI: 10.1038/s41566-018-0154-z
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41566-018-0154-z
In fact, typically the more efficiently they emit light, the more voltage they generate.
" What did they do: They chemically treated lead-halide perovskite, through a process known as "surface passivation," which treats imperfections and reduces the likelihood that the absorbed photons will end up wasted rather than converted to useful energy. They experimented with a variety of chemicals for surface passivation before finding one, an organic compound known by its acronym TOPO, that boosted perovskite performance to levels approaching the best gallium arsenide semiconductors By fitting the emission spectra to a theoretical model, they showed that these materials could generate voltages 97 percent of the theoretical maximum, equal to the world record gallium arsenide solar cell and much higher than record silicon cells that only reach 84 percent. These improvements in material quality are theoretically predicted to enable the light-to-electricity power conversion efficiency to reach 27.9 percent under regular sunlight levels, which would push the perovskite-based photovoltaic record past the best silicon devices.
Gold, titanium, palladium or a silica compound is used as a back-reflector surface to test perovskite performance.
Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2018-07-boost-quality-perovskites.html#jCp
More information:
Ian L. Braly et al. Hybrid
perovskite films approaching the radiative limit with over 90%
photoluminescence quantum efficiency, Nature Photonics (2018). DOI: 10.1038/s41566-018-0154-z
Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2018-07-boost-quality-perovskites.html#jCp
Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2018-07-boost-quality-perovskites.html#jCp
More information: Ian L. Braly et al. Hybrid perovskite films approaching the radiative limit with over 90% photoluminescence quantum efficiency, Nature Photonics (2018). DOI: 10.1038/s41566-018-0154-z
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41566-018-0154-z
