Solliance Reaches 14.5% Cell Efficiency for Large Perovskite Modules

Solliance demonstrated a new record stabilized active area power conversion efficiency of 14.5% for its up-scaled thin-film perovskite photovoltaic modules on glass. The efficiency was measured on an aperture area of 144 cm2.
 
The PV module was realized on a commercial 6×6 inch2 glass substrate provided with a transparent conductor by applying three consecutive and industrially scalable slot die coating processes and by using a newly developed scalable annealing process. The metal top electrode was evaporated. Twenty-four cells were connected in series through optimized P1, P2, P3 laser-based scribes.
 
The stabilized aperture area efficiency was 13.8%. Individual spin coated cells and slot die coated cells with the same device architecture and materials showed cell performances of 14.5%, which is perfectly on par with the measured active area performance of 14.5% of the produced modules. In total 10 modules were produced with few process setting variations for optimization purposes, but all showed stabilized aperture area efficiency numbers above 10%, meaning a “production” yield of 100%.
 
These results demonstrate further the up-scalability of this new thin film PV technology. This indicates the low production cost potential of this new emerging thin film PV technology. Furthermore, the deposition and interconnection technologies used for obtaining these results are industrially available for sheet-to-sheet as well as for roll-to-roll manufacturing, as shown for the previously published results on the R2R produced modules. The latter allows for creating high volume production of flexible and light-weight PV modules in the future.
 
“With our newly developed industry compatible large area coating and crystallization processes we were able to scale-up the active area of our solar cell devices with three orders of magnitude without any performance loss. This is another important step forward in bringing perovskite-based PV modules to the market,” said Francesco Di Giacomo, senior scientist at Solliance. “At the same time, we are in the process of introducing a much more stable material stack into our large area deposition processes.”
 
The current certified world record efficiency of a small lab scale perovskite based PV cell is 22.7%. “The challenge is to scale perovskite cells to larger size modules whilst keeping the high efficiency and low material and industrial processing costs at high yield. The reported result, presented on an aperture area comparable to standard commercial silicon solar cells, shows that Solliance, with its in-depth know-how on processing of organic PV, CIGS and its vast pilot production infrastructure, is excellently placed to realize this upscaling. This 13.8% up-scaled perovskite-based PV module is another important step in this development. Apart from the fact that we are confident to boost quickly the up-scaled Perovskite based PV module efficiency further above 15% we are also currently making good progress to stabilize the performance of these devices under real life operational conditions,” added Ronn Andriessen, director at Solliance.
 
Solliance is conducting advanced research on the development of perovskite-based PV modules and its applications with its industrial partners Solartek, Greatcell Solar Limited and Shell.