South Korea’s research team has succeeded in developing a new hybrid solar battery with high efficiency that has increased voltage and can absorb wide bandwidth of light from visible ray to infrared light.
Sunlight is composed of UV ray (7%), visible ray (44%), and infrared light (48%) and others. Perovskite solar battery is considered as the source of energy in the future since it has the most excellent performance out of all next-generation solar batteries that are being developed. Although its performance is the greatest, there is limitation in improving its efficiency since it creates energy by using only visible ray instead of UV ray and infrared light.
Organic solar batteries are considered as next-generation solar batteries. Although these batteries allow low-temperature solution process and are also light and mechanically flexible, there is limitation in increasing performance of these batteries due to low open voltage and low electric charge mobility.
Although researches on increasing absorption range up to infrared light were done throughout the world, efficiency of these new batteries were actually lower than Perovskite solar batteries.
Research team led by Professor Lee Kwang-hee of GIST (Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology) has developed a new hybrid solar battery with high efficiency that has an object photoactive layer and an organic and nonorganic mixed Perovskite photoactive layer combined in a single element and can solve this problem.
Research team layered an organic photoactive layer that can absorb infrared light on top of Perovskite photoactive layer that can absorb visible ray. By doing so, it was able to develop a hybrid solar battery that has wider absorption range.
To minimize loss of efficiency of a hybrid solar battery, research team optimized mobility and efficiency in formation of electric charge by introducing N-type polymer, which has high electric charge mobility, and a new solvent additive inside of an organic photoactive layer together. By doing so, research team was able to record 16.4% of efficiency, which is the highest out of hybrid solar batteries that are reported by current educational industries. Result of this research was published on the 27th of April through ‘Advanced Materials’, which is a globally prestige press in material science.
“I expect that technologies on solar energy that will be used to solve shortage of energy in future society will be pushed forward by one step.” said Professor Lee Kwang-hee.
Staff Reporter Seo, Injoo | sij@etnews.com