Helmholtz Center achieves 29.80% performance for perovskite/silicon tandem solar cell

• The result was certified by Germany's Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems' (ISE) CalLab as well as included in the charts of the united state Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory.

Scientists at the Helmholtz Center Berlin (HZB) claim to have actually produced a perovskite/silicon tandem solar cell with a world record efficiency of 29.80%.

The result, which has been certified by Germany's Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems' (ISE) CalLab, was likewise included in the charts of the U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory. It improves upon the previous world record attained by perovskite developer Oxford PV in December 2020, when the U.K.-based company revealed a power conversion effectiveness of 29.52% for its perovskite/silicon tandem tool.

The solar cell has an area of 1cm2 and is based on a nanotextured front side and a rear end with a dielectric reflector, which is utilized to show infrared light back right into the silicon absorber.

The nanotexturing on one side, according to the scientists, is not only responsible for boosting light absorption and photocurrent, compared to a referral solar cell without the nanotextures, yet it also, surprisingly, improved, slightly, the digital quality of the tandem tool and enabled far better film development of the perovskite layers.

"By using a dielectric reflector, we had the ability to utilize this part of the sunlight much more effectively, resulting in a greater photocurrent," claimed HZB researcher Alexandros Cruz Bournazou, keeping in mind that the performance of the solar cell may quickly go beyond the 30% limit, via nanostructuring the absorber layers on both sides.

All the technological details on the solar cell can be located in the paper Monolithic perovskite/silicon tandem solar cell with > 29% performance by boosted hole extraction, which was released in Energy in December 2020, when the very same study group attained an effectiveness of 29.15%.