KAUST team roll on with solar perovskite production

According to the team at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), they were also able to coat the ink onto textured silicon, creating the ‘very first slot-die coated silicon-perovskite monolithic tandem solar cell’ with a claimed efficiency of 23.8 per cent. It is hoped that their ink formulation could help to turn PSCs into commercially successful products.

Swansea team on a roll with printed perovskite solar cells

“PSCs have shown a lot of promise in lab-scale work over the last decade,” said Anand Subbiah, a postdoctoral researcher in Stefaan De Wolf’s lab at KAUST. “As a community, we need to start looking at the stability and scalability of PSC technology.”

PSCs made in research labs are typically made by spin-coating, which is unsuited to mass manufacture. Slot-die-coating, in contrast, is a technique used industrially for almost 70 years. In a statement, Subbiah said the process involves continuously and precisely forcing an ink through a narrow slit that is moved across the substrate to form a continuous film. “This high-throughput technique would allow for roll-to-roll fabrication, similar to printing newspapers,” he said.