Researchers from Swansea University found that perovskite solar cells can tolerate dusty manufacturing environments and perform almost as well as cells made in cleanrooms. The findings suggest that low-cost, scalable production may be possible without ultrasterile conditions, potentially accelerating the production of cells and modules.
A research team from Swansea University in the United Kingdom investigated how dusty manufacturing environments affect perovskite solar cells and found that devices exposed to dust perform similarly to devices produced in clean conditions, with only minor losses in some performance metrics.
“Our findings are a major win for the future of affordable green energy,” said Kat Lacey, lead author of the study. “For a long time, we thought that high-quality perovskite solar cells had to be made in expensive, ultra-sterile environments. However, our research shows that these cells are surprisingly resilient: they can still perform remarkably well even when exposed to ordinary dust.”
Lacey called the results “game-changing,” explaining that they could accelerate the development of low-cost renewable energy production facilities in new areas. “While there is still a need to test how this holds up on a larger, industrial scale, these results are a huge first step,” she said. “We have shown that the path to a sustainable future may be a lot less complicated and much cheaper than we previously thought.”
The experiments were carried out in a dust box, with test dust applied to PV devices. The test substance had a particle size distribution similar to that of cleanroom standards, with approximately 90 percent by volume smaller than 5 μm. The devices were exposed to dust for approximately three minutes, which corresponds to dust exposure of 24 to 66 hours in standard laboratories and corridor areas, or 58 to 370 days in various classes of cleanrooms.
Two types of devices were tested. The first was a standard laboratory stack consisting of tin(IV) oxide (SnO₂) as the electron transport layer (ETL), methylammonium lead iodide (MAPI) as the perovskite light absorbing layer, spiro-MeOTAD as the hole transport layer (HTL), and gold as the top electrode. The second type was a future-proof stack designed for scalable production, consisting of tin(IV) oxide (SnO₂), methylammonium lead iodide (MAPI), poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene) (PEDOT) as the HTL and carbon as the top electrode, making it compatible with roll-to-roll (R2R) production techniques.
In both cases, dust was purposefully introduced at various stages of fabrication, specifically before deposition of the ETL, perovskite absorber, or HTK, to assess how contamination at each interface affects device performance. For each condition, the researchers further fabricated identical devices, dust-free, in a cleanroom environment, which served as reference samples.
The results showed that dusty devices performed similarly to clean devices, with only limited performance losses, most pronounced in the short-circuit current density, resulting in a small reduction in energy conversion efficiency. At the same time, the no-load voltage and fill factor remained largely unaffected.
“The perovskite crystals simply grew around and over the dust particles without significantly affecting the device’s ability to generate power,” the researchers said in a statement. “Contamination did not cause the cells to degrade faster than other mechanisms, even when exposed to high heat and humidity.”
Their findings appeared in “Production of planar perovskite solar cells in dusty environments”, published in Communication materials.
“These findings go some way to answering the question of whether good quality planar perovskite solar cells can be made outside a cleanroom environment, with the results showing that even when many non-conductive dust particles are present, devices can still perform well,” the academics concluded. “These findings also suggest that at the research level when making laboratory-scale devices, a cleanroom may not be essential when it comes to devices and materials suitable for scale-up, and if it is necessary, it may not need to be much more than the lowest level of dust particle control.”
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