Great Interest in the HySPRINT Industry Day: Joining forces to advance perovskite solar cells
No fewer than 70 participants attended the first Industry Day of the Helmholtz Innovation Lab HySPRINT devoted to the topic of perovskite solar cells at Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin (HZB) on 13 October 2017. This far exceeded the expectations of the event hosts. The knowledge shared on Industry Day will serve as the basis for deepening the collaboration even further with strategically important companies in the scope of HySPRINT.
“Seeing the industry partners’ active participation was very gratifying. We could feel in the lively discussions how there is great interest on both sides to collaborate even more closely on technology transfer,” says Dr. Stefan Gall, project manager of the Helmholtz Innovation Lab HySPRINT (“Hybrid Silicon Perovskite Research, Integration & Novel Technologies”). On the Industry Day, eight companies presented those topics that especially interest them. “From this, certain problems emerged that we are now going to work on targetedly with our industrial partners.”
The focus of this Industry Day was perovskite solar cells, an especially promising class of materials. Since 2009, their efficiency has been increased from just under 4 percent to more than 20 percent. In the scope of HySPRINT, several HZB institutes and young investigator groups are working on improving the efficiency and longevity of perovskite solar cells. Yet another important aim of HySPRINT is to upscale the process technology, given that perovskite solar cells have only ever been produced on a laboratory scale over small surface areas so far.
The Helmholtz Innovation Lab HySPRINT was founded in 2017 under the management of HZB. It is one of seven Helmholtz Innovation Labs with which the Helmholtz Association intends to boost technology transfer. HySPRINT is essentially financed from the President’s Initiative and Networking Fund of the Helmholtz Association.
For Dr. Martin Kamprath, a programme manager of the Helmholtz Association, this concept was validated on the first HySPRINT Industry Day. “The event was an exciting prelude to the HySPRINT LAB, during which industrial partners and scientists got together as equals. HySPRINT could become THE germ cell in which perovskite solar cells are developed to market maturity.”
Given the positive feedback, the HySPRINT Industry Day will from now on continue to be held once a year.
Companies with short presentations on the HySPRINT Industry Day:
Aleo Solar, Fluxim, FOM Technologies, JCM Wave, Kurt. J. Lesker Company, LIMO Lissotschenko Mikrooptik, Oxford PV, PI Berlin
- Battery research: visualisation of aging processes operandoLithium button cells with electrodes made of nickel-manganese-cobalt oxides (NMC) are very powerful. Unfortunately, their capacity decreases over time. Now, for the first time, a team has used a non-destructive method to observe how the elemental composition of the individual layers in a button cell changes during charging cycles. The study, now published in the journal Small, involved teams from the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB), the University of Münster, researchers from the SyncLab research group at HZB and the BLiX laboratory at the Technical University of Berlin. Measurements were carried out in the BLiX laboratory and at the BESSY II synchrotron radiation source.
- New instrument at BESSY II: The OÆSE endstation in EMILA new instrument is now available at BESSY II for investigating catalyst materials, battery electrodes and other energy devices under operating conditions: the Operando Absorption and Emission Spectroscopy on EMIL (OÆSE) endstation in the Energy Materials In-situ Laboratory Berlin (EMIL). A team led by Raul Garcia-Diez and Marcus Bär showcases the instrument’s capabilities via a proof-of-concept study on electrodeposited copper.
- An elegant method for the detection of single spins using photovoltageDiamonds with certain optically active defects can be used as highly sensitive sensors or qubits for quantum computers, where the quantum information is stored in the electron spin state of these colour centres. However, the spin states have to be read out optically, which is often experimentally complex. Now, a team at HZB has developed an elegant method using a photo voltage to detect the individual and local spin states of these defects. This could lead to a much more compact design of quantum sensors.