I-Corps: Customer Discovery for Light Weight Photovoltaics

该项目旨在将I-Corps团队开发的低成本、高性能太阳能电池技术商业化。实验室测试已经证明，它的功率输出可以与市面上最好的设备相媲美，而且还在不断改进。所提出的设计中使用的材料是常见的，设备可以通过几个简单的步骤制造。在相对较低的温度下沉积预混合溶液可以生产这些太阳能电池。这种类型的生产适合“卷对卷”制造，采用轻质、柔性材料。使用普通材料和简单的生产技术有可能大大降低太阳能的成本。除了大规模发电之外，廉价、轻便、灵活的太阳能电池还可以在建筑、救灾工作中的便携式发电以及无人机和远程电力等军事应用中找到新的应用。该团队开发了一种简单且易于扩展的技术，可以快速且廉价地生产用于钙钛矿太阳能电池的大颗粒钙钛矿吸收剂。结果表明，该团队创造的大颗粒钙钛矿材料的缺陷更少，器件性能更高，与其他薄膜太阳能电池类似。与所有其他光伏（PV）设备一样，大颗粒对于高？能量转换。该团队的目标是确定市场对钙钛矿太阳能电池技术的兴趣。这将帮助他们确定采用拟议技术的最佳途径——他们是寻求成为材料供应商，钙钛矿太阳能电池制造商，还是只是将技术授权给已经进入太阳能市场的公司。团队打算学习识别和量化采用该技术必须满足的指标。

This project aims to commercialize the technology this I-Corps team has developed for low-cost, high-performance solar cells. Laboratory testing has already demonstrated power output that is competitive with the best commercially available devices and improvements are still being made. The materials used in the proposed design are common and devices can be manufactured in a few simple steps. Depositing a pre-mixed solution at relatively low temperatures can produce these solar cells. This type of production lends itself to "roll-to-roll" fabrication on lightweight, flexible materials. The use of common materials and simple production techniques has the potential to dramatically reduce the cost of solar energy. In addition to large scale power generation, inexpensive, lightweight, flexible solar cells could find new applications in construction, portable power generation in disaster relief efforts, and military applications such as drones and remote power.This team has developed a simple, and readily scalable, technique to rapidly and inexpensively produce large grain perovskite absorbers for perovskite solar cells. The results indicate that the large grain perovskite material this team has created results in fewer defects and increased device performance, similar to what is seen with other thin film solar cells. With all other photovoltaic (PV) devices, large grains are essential for high?]energy conversion. The team's goal is to determine the market interest in perovskite solar cell technology. This will help them determine the best path forward with the proposed technology - should they seek to become a provider of material, a perovskite solar cell manufacturer, or just license the technology to a company already in the solar marketplace. The team intends to learn to identify and quantify the metrics that must be met for adoption of this technology.