Hybrid Perovskite Quantum Dots for High Efficiency Solar Cells

The Joint Chemical Engineering and Industrial Chemistry Committee South Australia warmly welcomes you as Professor and ARC Laureate Fellow Lianzhou Wang , discusses Hybrid Perovskite Quantum Dots for High Efficiency Solar Cells.

Quantum dot solar cells are part of a ‘next generation’ of solar energy innovations, that avoid the need for stiff and brittle silicon wafers, achieving the same light-to-electricity conversion characteristics in chemical-based semiconductors.

“The new class of quantum dots the University has developed are flexible and printable,” professor Wang said.

“This opens up a huge range of potential applications, including the possibility to use it as a transparent skin to power cars, planes, homes and wearable technology.”

Perovskite quantum dots (QDs) have the advantages of quantum confinement effect, defect-tolerant nature, and the capability of developing lightweight and flexible films, thus attracting much recent research for a variety of functional device developments including QD solar cells and LEDs.

Here we report our recent progress on a novel surface ligand engineering strategy in designing new hybrid perovskite QDs, which leads to not only fundamental understanding on the optoelectronic working mechanism of the QDs, but also remarkably improve the optoelectronic quality of the perovskite QDs. The new classes of perovskite quantum dots have been used as building blocks in Quantum Dot Solar Cells with a certified world record efficiency of 16.6% with excellent long-term operation stability.

By using QDs as light absorbing materials, the QD based photocatalysts also exhibited good performance in photocatalytic gaseous hydrogen production. The integration of perovskite solar cells and rechargeable batteries have led to a single module type rechargeable solar batteries with an overall storable solar energy conversion efficiency of >12%.