EUROPEAN CONGRESS AND EXHIBITION ON ADVANCED MATERIALS AND PROCESSES - EUROMAT 2021

The main innovation of the presented research is the development of a new product - a PV module mounted on a flexible fabric substrate. The PV module was designed to cover acoustic screens standing along railway lines. After minor modifications, the application of this solution will also be possible in conjunction with acoustic screens built along other communication routes (e.g. highways). An...

In this work, photocatalyic properties of thin films based on titanim oxides for application in elastic PV panels were presented. Thin films were prepared by impulse magnetron sputtering, where the gas injection on a target was synchronized in time with electric pulse supplying magnetron with Ti target. Deposition process was conduct under various Ar:O2 atmosphere. As-deposited films were...

Soiling, dust accumulation on the protective glass of photovoltaics (PV) systems, leads to a loss of light transmittance to the solar cells, which considerably reduces the efficiency of the PV process. Active mitigation of soiling, i.e., cleaning of PV modules, is a key process for modules performance; however, it is not always an easy and economical action. In this work, a passive soiling...

Photovoltaic (PV) technology has evolved rapidly in the past few decades and now encompasses a large variety of materials and device structures. A key aspect to be considered in any PV technology is the operational durability under real outdoor conditions, as well as the sustainability of materials/components and the facile integration with energy storage systems.
In the last five years,...

Earth-abundant and low-cost materials are essential for future large-scale deployment of thin-film photovoltaics. However, many such materials face numerous challenges as the optimal performance requires fine-tuning of optoelectronic properties, which is usually achieved through defect engineering. Defect identification is a first step in this direction. This work gives an example of...

The path towards inexpensive solar cells for large-scale photovoltaic deployment is based on the utilisation of earth-abundant, non-toxic, and chemically stable materials. Among these, wide-bandgap semiconductors (1.6 -1.8 eV) are especially interesting as suitable partners for a bottom Si-based cell in tandem configuration. One promising candidate is BaZrS3, with a tunable direct bandgap,...

Transparent Conductors Materials (TCM) are of great technological importance for many devices and applications in the renewable energy production field. Tin-doped indium oxide (ITO) is the most used transparent conductive oxide (TCO) due to its high transparency in the VIS region (~ 80%) and low resistivity (10^(-2)-10^(-3) Ωcm). However, its large-scale usage faces the issue of scarcity,...

Water-processable organic nanoparticles (WPNPs) of semiconducting polymers recently received wide attention for optoelectronic applications due to their simple fabrication and tunable properties. The WPNP-based approach could be appealing to control active layer morphology in optoelectronic devices, such as organic photovoltaics (OPVs), organic light-emitting diodes, and organic field-effect...

Perovskite solar cells (PSCs) have been intensively investigated in the past decade and their power conversion efficiency (PCE) is reaching that of commercial silicon solar cells. However, the commercialization of PSCs remains a challenge. Inkjet printing has an advantage in terms of mass fabrication of PSCs over the conventional spin-coating method. In this study, we developed the...

Recently, it was demonstrated that organic chromophores able to undergo singlet fission can double the efficiency of solar cells. In singlet fission materials the chromophores split each singlet exciton into two triplet excitons, which can eventually dissociate into twice as many charge carriers in the photovoltaic devices. Therefore, the singlet fission process is a literal illustration of...

Low-temperature thermophotovoltaics (TPV) demands very low band gap (< 0.5 eV) semiconductors to maximize output power. As the band gap narrows down, so does the number of available materials. Current technology is mostly based on epitaxially-grown alloys of III-V elements, such as InGaAs(Sb), which present some limitations. First, it is not always possible to obtain the desired band gap, due...

Over the recent years an increased effort was devoted to nanophotonic engineering as a promising route to reach and overcome the detailed-balance limit.
In this project we focus on the optimization of the open-circuit voltage ($V_{oc}$) of a nanowire solar cell. The ultimate limit for the $V_{oc}$ can be achieved if the external radiative efficiency ($\eta_{ext}^{PL}$) and the ratio between...

The use of light-trapping (LT) techniques to boost photon capture thus increasing the photocurrent is a very effective way to improve the solar cell’s efficiency. Among the different LT strategies available, metal-assisted chemical etching (MACE) is one of the most simple and cost-effective. MACE has already proved its ability to strongly reduce the reflectivity of the silicon surface and...