The €5million project, entitled CHEOPS, aims to upscale promising initial trials of the technology to industrial and commercial levels.
Dr Heather Yates, principal investigator for the Salford CHEOPS project said: “As researchers, we may get excited when we achieve a new efficiency record with a small cell of about 1cm2 but to prove this technology we need modules of at least 15cm2 and we need them to be stable.
“At Salford we will be employing a technique called Atmospheric Pressure Chemical Vapour Deposition to produce large-scale thin films which make up the perovskite cell. We will also consider how to produce films using tools, techniques and procedures that can readily be implemented in an industrial environment,” Dr Yates added.
In addition to upscaling the technology, researchers will also produce tandem cells - with a perovskite cell on top of a conventional silicon-based cell. Such tandem cells are said to harvest a broader spectrum of light than a single cell, which should lead to a further increase in their efficiency of around 30%.
The researchers claim that existing manufacturing methods used for silicon devices might require only minor modification before being used to produce tandem cells, as the perovskite layer would simply be added on top of the conventional cell to act as an ‘efficiency booster’.
Dr Yates explained: “It is essential to continually improve the attractiveness of solar as a renewable energy source. Perovskite photovoltaic technology can be an important step in this direction and the team at Salford University are looking forward to sharing our findings with our academic and industrial partners.
The CHEOPS Project is coordinated by CSEM, Switzerland and co-funded by the European research and innovation programme Horizon 2020, and will end in January 2019.
