Netherlands Researchers Break the 30 Percent Barrier In Solar Cells

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Interesting Engineering: A collaboration of researchers from various institutes in the Netherlands broke the 30 percent barrier associated with solar cells. The achievement will help uptakeworldwide solar energy and reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, an organizational press release said. [...] To do so, researchers in the Netherlands came together to create a four-terminal perovskite/silicon tandem device. A tandem device can better use solar spectrum since it uses a mix of silicon-based solar cells with perovskite-based solar cells. While the former works well with light in the visible and infrared spectrum, perovskites can use wavelength in the ultraviolet and visible light while being transparent to infrared light. In a four-terminal tandem device, the top and bottom cells can operate independently, allowing bifacial tandems to be used, further boosting the power output of the architecture. The press release said that the researchers improved the efficiency of a semi-transparent perovskite cell with an area of 3x3 sq. mm up to 19.7 percent. Below this, a silicon solar cell, which was 20X 20 sq. mm wide, was placed. The tandem device also had a highly transparent back contact that allowed 93 percent of the near-infrared light to reach the bottom of the device. The silicon device was optimized using a host of features, and its efficiency improved to 10.4 percent. Together with the perovskite solar cell, the device delivered a combined energy conversion efficiency of 30.1 percent, making it the best efficiency achieved so far.

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