Research

Flexell Space is planning to put its perovskite-copper indium gallium selenide (CIGS) tandem solar cell technology in-orbit later this year. It has also raised venture capital and signed several collaboration agreements, including a technology transfer with the Korea Institute of Energy Research.

Researchers in Singapore have accelerated the weathering of PV backsheets and investigated their flame spread behavior at different intervals. After 6 weeks, they found that weathered PV backsheets show 46% faster flame spread than unwearthered ones. They have also highlighted that current safety standards fail to account for long-term degradation.

Scientists from Japan, Saudi Arabia and the United States have investigated existing back-contact perovskite solar cell architectures and have proposed a strategy to help reach commercial production.

Canadian and U.S. researchers have investigated applying pressure to a 2D hybrid organic-inorganic perovskite to tune the optical and electronic properties to suit photovoltaic applications, light emitting diodes or other semiconductor devices.

The Chinese manufacturer said the result was achieved thanks to new perovskite crystallization additives and high-mobility carrier transport layer materials.

A team of scientists in the United States has combined both spatial and temporal attention mechanisms to develop a new approach for PV inverter fault detection. Training the new method on a dataset created in MATLAB/Simulink, the group has compared it to a series of other data-driven and statistical-based methods and has found accuracy reached 97.35%.

The Chinese company said its new microinverter supports four independent MPPT inputs with DC input currents up to 18 A.

Scientists have used a dual-functional, material-sharing strategy with ethyl viologen diiodide to achieve synergistic performance enhancement in PV-powered batteries. The system was reportedly able to power a wearable glucose monitor for 24 hours.

Researchers at the University of Miyazaki in Japan used a new non-destructive method to enable them to investigate solar cell vibrations independently of module components. The study included potential design features for resonance-resistant vehicle integrated PV modules that would increase the natural resonance frequency to above 2,000 Hz.

Researchers at Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems in Germany developed a predictive model for light and elevated temperature induced degradation in gallium-doped silicon wafer that includes the effects of temporary recovery.