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Reliable fabrication of large-area perovskite films with antisolvent-free printing techniques requires high-volatility solvents, such as 2-methoxyethanol (2ME), to formulate precursor inks. However, the fabrication of high-quality cesium-formamidinium (Cs-FA) perovskites has been hampered using volatile solvents due to their poor coordination with the perovskite precursors. Here, this issue is resolved by re-formulating a 2ME-based Cs 0.05 FA 0.95 PbI 3 ink using pre-synthesized single crystals as the precursor instead of the conventional mixture of raw powders. The key to obtaining high-quality Cs-FA films lies in the removal of colloidal particles from the ink and hence the suppression of colloid-induced heterogeneous nucleation, which kinetically facilitates the growth of as-formed crystals toward larger grains and improved film crystallinity. Employing the precursor-engineered volatile ink in the vacuum-free, fully printing processing of solar cells (with carbon electrode), a power conversion efficiency (PCE) of 19.3%, a T 80 (80% of initial PCE) of 1000 h in ISOS-L-2I (85 °C/1 Sun) aging test and a substantially reduced bill of materials are obtained. The reliable coating methodology ultimately enables the fabrication of carbon-electrode mini solar modules with a stabilized PCE of 16.2% (average 15.6%) representing the record value among the fully printed counterparts and a key milestone toward meeting the objectives for a scalable photovoltaic technology., (© 2024 The Authors. Advanced Science published by Wiley‐VCH GmbH.)

Despite the great success of perovskite photovoltaics in terms of device efficiency and stability using laboratory-scale spin-coating methods, the demand for high-throughput and cost-effective solutions remains unresolved and rarely reported because of the complicated nature of perovskite crystallization. In this work, we propose a stable precursor ink design strategy to control the solvent volatilization and perovskite crystallization to enable the wide speed window printing (0.3 to 18.0 m/min) of phase-pure FAPbI 3 perovskite solar cells (pero-SCs) in ambient atmosphere. The FAPbI 3 perovskite precursor ink uses volatile acetonitrile (ACN) as the main solvent with DMF and DMSO as coordination additives is beneficial to improve the ink stability, inhibit the coffee rings, and the complicated intermediate FAPbI 3 phases, delivering high-quality pin-hole free and phase-pure FAPbI 3 perovskite films with large-scale uniformity. Ultimately, small-area FAPbI 3 pero-SCs (0.062 cm 2 ) and large-area modules (15.64 cm 2 ) achieved remarkable efficiencies of 24.32 % and 21.90 %, respectively, whereas the PCE of the devices can be maintained at 23.76 % when the printing speed increases to 18.0 m/min. Specifically, the unencapsulated device exhibits superior operational stability with T 90 >1350 h. This work represents a step towards the scalable, cost-effective manufacturing of perovskite photovoltaics with both high performance and high throughput., (© 2023 Wiley-VCH GmbH.)

The carnivorous plant algorithm (CPA), which was recently proposed for solving optimization problems, is a population-based optimization algorithm inspired by plants. In this study, the exploitation phase of the CPA was improved with the teaching factor strategy in order to achieve a balance between the exploration and exploitation capabilities of CPA, minimize getting stuck in local minima, and produce more stable results. The improved CPA is called the I-CPA. To test the performance of the proposed I-CPA, it was applied to CEC2017 functions. In addition, the proposed I-CPA was applied to the problem of identifying the optimum parameter values of various solar photovoltaic modules, which is one of the real-world optimization problems. According to the experimental results, the best value of the root mean square error (RMSE) ratio between the standard data and simulation data was obtained with the I-CPA method. The Friedman mean rank statistical analyses were also performed for both problems. As a result of the analyses, it was observed that the I-CPA produced statistically significant results compared to some classical and modern metaheuristics. Thus, it can be said that the proposed I-CPA achieves successful and competitive results in identifying the parameters of solar photovoltaic modules.

In this paper, an attempt is made to build an effective solar photovoltaic (PV) system considering geographical aspects such as irradiance and temperature using the single-diode equation model. Furthermore, a comparative analysis of various DC-DC converters (buck, boost, inverting buck-boost, non-inverting buck-boost (NIBB), Cuk, and single-ended primary inductance converter (SEPIC)) connected to a solar photovoltaic (PV) module was conducted in order to determine the optimal combination of DC-DC converter and solar PV. Moreover, the R, L, and C parameters for the converters have also been proposed to gain optimum efficiency from the solar PV system, and it has been shown that increasing the resistance decreases the ripple value. Furthermore, it has been shown that Ns and Np values of 36 and 1, respectively, result in 199 W of output power from a solar PV module at the maximum power point (48 V). The obtained results show that NIBB and SEPIC simulations gave the best results, with efficiencies of 93.27% and 92.35%, respectively., (© 2023. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.)

Further enhancing the operational lifetime of inverted-structure perovskite solar cells (PSCs) is crucial for their commercialization, and the design of hole-selective contacts at the illumination side plays a key role in operational stability. In this work, the self-anchoring benzo[rst]pentaphene (SA-BPP) is developed as a new type of hole-selective contact toward long-term operationally stable inverted PSCs. The SA-BPP molecule with a graphene-like conjugated structure shows a higher photostability and mobility than that of the frequently-used triphenylamine and carbazole-based hole-selective molecules. Besides, the anchoring groups of SA-BPP promote the formation of a large-scale uniform hole contact on ITO substrate and efficiently passivate the perovskite absorbers. Benefiting from these merits, the champion efficiencies of 22.03% for the small-sized cells and 17.08% for 5 × 5 cm 2 solar modules on an aperture area of 22.4 cm 2 are achieved based on this SA-BPP contact. Also, the SA-BPP-based device exhibits promising operational stability, with an efficiency retention of 87.4% after 2000 h continuous operation at the maximum power point under simulated 1-sun illumination, which indicates an estimated T 80 lifetime of 3175 h. This novel design concept of hole-selective contacts provides a promising strategy for further improving the PSC stability., (© 2023 The Authors. Advanced Materials published by Wiley-VCH GmbH.)

Nowadays, a dye-sensitized solar cell (DSSC) attracts attention to its development widely due to its several advantages, such as simple processes, low costs, and flexibility. In this work, we demonstrate the difference in device structures between small size and large size cells (5 cm × 5 cm, 10 cm × 10 cm and 10 cm × 15 cm). The design of the photoanode and dye-sensitized process plays important roles in affecting the cell efficiency and stability. The effects of the TiO 2 electrode, using TiCl 4(aq) pretreatment and post-treatment processes, are also discussed, whereas, the open-circuit voltage (Voc), short-circuit current density (Jsc), and module efficiency are successfully improved. Furthermore, the effects on module performances by some factors, such as dye solution concentration, dye soaking temperature, and electrolyte injection method are also investigated. We have demonstrated that the output power of a 5 cm × 5 cm DSSC module increases from 86.2 mW to 93.7 mW, and the module efficiency achieves an outstanding performance of 9.79%. Furthermore, enlarging the DSSC modules to two sizes (10 cm × 10 cm and 10 cm × 15 cm) and comparing the performance with different module designs (C-DSSC and S-DSSC) also provides the specific application of polymer sealing and preparing high-efficiency large-area DSSC modules.

Perovskite solar cells (PSCs) emerging as a promising photovoltaic technology with high efficiency and low manufacturing cost have attracted the attention from all over the world. Both the efficiency and stability of PSCs have increased steadily in recent years, and the research on reducing lead leakage and developing eco-friendly lead-free perovskites pushes forward the commercialization of PSCs step by step. This review summarizes the main progress of PSCs in 2020 and 2021 from the aspects of efficiency, stability, perovskite-based tandem devices, and lead-free PSCs. Moreover, a brief discussion on the development of PSC modules and its challenges toward practical application is provided.

The low-temperature fabrication of flexible ZnO photo-anodes for dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSCs) by templated electrochemical deposition of films was performed in an enlarged and technical simplified deposition setup to demonstrate the feasibility of the scale-up of the deposition process. After extraction of eosin Y (EY) from the initially deposited ZnO/EY hybrid films, mesoporous ZnO films with an area of about 40 cm² were reproducibly obtained on fluorine doped tin oxide (FTO)-glass as well as flexible indium tin oxide (ITO)-polyethylenterephthalate (PET) substrates. With a film thickness of up to 9 µm and a high specific surface area of up to about 77 m²·cm -3 the ZnO films on the flexible substrates show suitable properties for DSSCs. Operative flexible DSSC modules proved the suitability of the ZnO films for use as DSSC photo-anodes. Under a low light intensity of about 0.007 sun these modules achieved decent performance parameters with conversion efficiencies of up to 2.58%. With rising light intensity the performance parameters deteriorated, leading to conversion efficiencies below 1% at light intensities above 0.5 sun. The poor performance of the modules under high light intensities can be attributed to their high series resistances., Competing Interests: The authors declare no conflict of interest.