Korean team achieves perovskite solar cell efficiencies over 18 percent
Inorganic-organic lead halide perovskite materials show a great deal of promise for next-generation solar devices due to their high power conversion efficiency, with the highest efficiencies obtained mainly with methylammonium lead halide materials.
Now scientists from the Korea Research Institute of Chemical Technology, and Sungkyunkwan University have combined the promising but relatively unstable formamidinium lead iodide (FAPbI3) with methylammonium lead bromide (MAPbBr3) as the light-harvesting unit in a bilayer solar-cell architecture. Using this combination, they have achieved over 18 percent efficiency under a standard illumination of 100 milliwatts per square centimetre.
Their results, published in Nature this week, showed that incorporation of MAPbBr3 into FAPbI3 not only improves the power conversion efficiency but stabilises the perovskite phase of FAPbI3.
According to the researchers, these findings further emphasise the versatility and performance potential of inorganic-organic lead halide perovskite materials for photovoltaic applications.
"˜Compositional engineering of perovskite materials for high-performance solar cells', by Nam Joong Jeon et al, appears in Nature (2015) doi:10.1038/nature14133
