Abstract:
Renewable electricity from solar photovoltaics (PV), combined with low-cost large-scale storage, will play a key role in decarbonizing and expanding the global power sector. For example, the global deployment of PV is targeted at ~75 terawatts installed capacity by 2050, from the current (2022) ~1 terawatt. This is expected to contribute significantly towards limiting global warming to 1.5 °C above the pre-industrial age stated in the COP-21 2015 Paris agreement, thereby avoiding the dire consequences of global climate change. Thus, PV are likely to dominate the global power sector for achieving and maintaining a net-zero-carbon future. Currently used PV technologies are efficient, reliable, and relatively cheap, but there is, and always will be, insatiable demand for new PV technologies that are more efficient and cost-effective, and importantly, have a lower ‘carbon-footprint.’ In this context, the burgeoning perovskite thin-film PV technology meets all these requirements and offers unprecedented promise, which will be discussed. While the record power-conversion efficiency of perovskite PV now rivals conventional silicon PV, stability and mechanical reliability are becoming ‘bottleneck’ challenges in perovskite PV. To address some of these technical hurdles in the path towards their commercialization, several rationally-designed microstructural and interfacial tailoring approaches are used. These include grain-coarsening, grain-boundary functionalization, and interfacial engineering. Most importantly, these approaches are designed to not only enhance the PVs’ mechanical reliability but also increase efficiency and improve stability simultaneously. The scientific rationales for these approaches will be discussed, together with the presentation of current results.
Speakers Bio:
Nitin P. Padture is the Otis E. Randall University Professor in the School of Engineering, and founding Director of the Initiative for Sustainable Energy, at Brown University. Previously he served as Director of Brown’s Institute for Molecular and Nanoscale Innovation for eight years. Prior to January 2012, he was College of Engineering Distinguished Professor at The Ohio State University (OSU), and founding Director of NSF-funded Materials Research Science and Engineering Center at OSU. Padture’s research and teaching interests are in the broad areas of advanced ceramics, semiconductors, and nanomaterials used in applications ranging from jet engines to solar cells. He is author or co-author of about 300 publications, which have been widely cited. Padture is Fellow of the American Ceramic Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Materials Research Society. A proud IIT-Bombay alumnus (1985 B.Tech. Mett. Engg., Hostel 3), he received IIT-B Distinguished Service Award (2012) and the Distinguished Alumnus Award (2017). Most recently he received the Brown’s Presidential Faculty Award. Padture is Editor of two top journals in the field of materials science and engineering: Acta Materialia and *Scripta Materialia.