According to the research team, the power conversion efficiency (PCE) of the device with the anti-reflective coating (ARC) film was sustained for 120 hours, maintaining 91 per cent of its initial value.
This breakthrough has been led by Professor Kyoung Jin Choi and his research team in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Ulsan National Institute of Science & Technology (UNIST), South Korea, in collaboration with Professor Jung-Kun Lee and his research team from the University of Pittsburgh in the US.
In the work, the research team demonstrated that a combination of silicon dioxide (SiO2) nanoparticles and large phosphor particles can convert ultraviolet (UV) to visible light and increase total transmittance of ARC film. Their experimental and computational results also show that SiO2 nanoparticles in the ARC film decrease the reflectance by increasing the diffuse transmittance.
According to UNIST, the PCE of the device with the ARC film was sustained for 120 hours, maintaining 91 per cent of its initial value, while the PCE of existing devices dropped to 90 per cent of its initial efficiency after five hours, and then decreased to 50 per cent after 20 hours. They added that the initial efficiency of the solar cell also increased by nearly 4.5 per cent compared to the previous one.
“This optically engineered ARC film successfully promotes the light absorption of the perovskite/silicon tandem solar cell, leading to the improvement of power conversion efficiency of the tandem cell from 22.48 per cent to 23.50 per cent,” noted the research team.
The team’s findings have been published in Advanced Functional Materials.
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