New Materials, Processes, and Cell Designs for Emerging Photovoltaic Technology

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Photovoltaic (PV) devices - solar cells - are one of the few technologies capable of producing safe, clean, renewable energy on a global scale, and will be crucial to any effort to curb the use of fossil fuels. For the past four decades, devices based on multi-crystalline silicon have been the dominant technology in the PV marketplace. However, recent work has shown that two new classes of materials - organic semiconductors and lead halide perovskites - can be used to produce solar cells with dramatically reduced costs and energy inputs. Unfortunately, the commercial potential of these two materials is currently limited; organic photovoltaic devices (OPVs) have a power conversion efficiency that is less than half that of conventional silicon devices, while perovskite solar cells (PSCs) suffer from a sensitivity to moisture and light, leading to extremely short device lifetimes.