Today at the EU PVSEC conference, imec, the world-leading research and innovation hub in nanoelectronics, energy and digital technologies, presents a thin-film tandem solar cell consisting of a top perovskite cell developed by Imec within the partnerships of EnergyVille and Solliance, and a bottom CIGS cell from the Centre for Solar Energy and Hydrogen Research (ZSW, Stuttgart, Germany). The tandem cell resulting from this collaboration achieves a record efficiency of 24.6 percent.
The perovskite top cell in the tandem uses light in the visible part of the solar spectrum, while the light in the near-IR spectrum that passes through the perovskite cell is harvested by the underlying CIGS cell. In this way, the tandem cell significantly outperforms the stand-alone perovskite and CIGS cells. Moreover, both perovskite and CIGS cells are thin-film solar cells, paving the way to high efficiency flexible solar cells and building integrated photovoltaic (BIPV) solutions.
The 4-terminal tandem consists of a perovskite solar cell stacked on top of a CIGS cell, based on a fully scalable device concept to enable industrial adoption of the process. The new record efficiency of 24.6 percent was achieved thanks to several innovations. First of all, the transmittance of the perovskite cell for near-IR light was improved by adding optical coupling layers to the tandem stack and by optimizing the transparent electrodes. Secondly, the perovskite itself was optimized in terms of a wide bandgap of 1.72eV for higher tandem efficiency.
Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2018-09-perovskitecigs-tandem-cell-efficiency-percent.html#jCp
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