• Energy Research

Photovoltaics is amongst the most important technologies for renewable energy sources, and plays a key role in the development of a society with a smaller environmental footprint. Key parameters for solar cells are their energy conversion efficiency, their operating lifetime, and the cost of the energy obtained from a photovoltaic system compared to other sources. The optimization of these aspects involves the exploitation of new materials and development of novel solar cell concepts and designs. Both theoretical modeling and characterization of such devices require a comprehensive view including all scales from the atomic to the macroscopic and industrial scale. The different length scales of the electronic and optical degrees of freedoms specifically lead to an intrinsic need for multiscale simulation, which is accentuated in many advanced photovoltaics concepts including nanostructured regions. Therefore, multiscale modeling has found particular interest in the photovoltaics community, as a tool to advance the field beyond its current limits. In this article, we review the field of multiscale techniques applied to photovoltaics, and we discuss opportunities and remaining challenges.

We report the first successful application of an ordered bicontinuous gyroid semiconducting network in a hybrid bulk heterojunction solar cell. The freestanding gyroid network is fabricated by electrochemical deposition into the 10 nm wide voided channels of a self-assembled, selectively degradable block copolymer film. The highly ordered pore structure is ideal for uniform infiltration of an organic hole transporting material, and solid-state dye-sensitized solar cells only 400 nm thick exhibit up to 1.7% power conversion efficiency. This patterning technique can be readily extended to other promising heterojunction systems and is a major step toward realizing the full potential of self-assembly in the next generation of device technologies.

AbstractOrganic–inorganic perovskite solar cells have achieved impressive power conversion efficiency over the past years, yet operational stability remains the key concern. One strategy to improve long‐term stability is to replace the thermally unstable organic with inorganic cations comprising the perovskite lattice. Here, for the first time, pulsed infrared light is used to drive the crystallization of inorganic mixed halide CsPbIxBr(3−x) perovskite films in solar cells with a power conversion efficiency exceeding 10%. By varying the iodide–bromine ratio systematically, it is found that to keep the inorganic perovskite black phase stable at the room temperature, the iodine content needs to be limited to lower than 60% – bromine content higher than 40%. The finding revises previous reports claiming stable compositions with higher iodine contents, which is systematically exploited to reduce the perovskite bandgap with the aim to enlarge the light absorption spectra and thus to boost the device efficiency. It is demonstrated that the newly defined stable compositional range enables devices that retain 90% of the efficiency after stressing the perovskite at 200 °C for 1 h. This result demonstrates that inorganic halide perovskites are stable materials for high‐temperature applications such as concentrated photovoltaics.