Project Name
Low-Temperature Growth of Perovskite Nanosystems for High-Performance Perovskite Solar Cells (no 1179)
Coordinator: Athanasia Kostopoulou
Host Laboratory: Ultrafast Laser Micro and Nano Processing Laboratory
Project Acronym
LowT-Perovskites
Total Budget: 179.974,80 EUR
Short Description
Photovoltaic is the most promising technology to convert the solar energy to useful electrical power. The need for materials of lower cost production than the commercially available has led to new photovoltaic technologies. In less than five years, the perovskite solar cells have been considered a promising photovoltaic technology due to the unprecedented rise of their power conversion (from 3.8 to 20 %) similar to that observed for the rest of the photovoltaic devices after decades of research effort. The light-harvesting active material for these solar cells is a perovskite, namely semiconductor of the type AMX3, where A is a cation (organic or inorganic), M a heavy atom (cation) such as Pb or Sn and X a halide atom (Cl, Br, I). Although hybrid perovskite solar cells exhibit quite high efficiencies, the perovskite absorber layers exhibit compositional degradation due to both heat and humidity, affecting the long-term stability of the photovoltaic devices.
According to these requirements, the main objective of the LowT-Perovskites project is to design and develop new, alternative and stable all-inorganic perovskite colloidal materials for perovskite solar cells of enhanced efficiency. The realization of this proposal requires viable methodologies to produce materials of high quality and long-term stability together with simple and flexible manufacture of devices with controllable physical, chemical, optical and electronic characteristics. In order to produce these materials of high quality, two methodologies (based on wet-chemistry and photo-induced procedures) have been carefully selected. These methodologies obey on the important requirements: i) easy procedures at low temperature (LT), ii) no-use of complex equipment (Schleck lines) or inert gas flow during the synthesis, iii) rapid and cost-efficiency, iv) reproducibility, v) quality/homogeneity of the products and vi) easily tune of morphology and phase. For these reasons, an interdisciplinary research team including scientists from physics, materials science and engineering is required.