Perovskite solar cells are a flexible and sustainable alternative to conventional silicon-based solar cells. Researchers at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) are part of an international team that was able to find – within only a few weeks – new organic molecules that increase the efficiency of perovskite solar cells.
Perovskite solar cells are a flexible and sustainable alternative to conventional silicon-based solar cells. Researchers at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) are part of an international team that was able to find – within only a few weeks – new organic molecules that increase the efficiency of perovskite solar cells. The team used a clever combination of artificial intelligence (AI) and automated high-throughput synthesis. Their strategy can also be applied to other areas of materials research, such as the search for new battery materials. The researchers report their findings in Science (DOI: 10.1126/science.ads0901).
In order to find out which of a million different molecules would conduct positive charges and make perovskite solar cells particularly efficient, one would need to synthesize and test all of them – or do as the researchers headed by Tenure-track Professor Pascal Friederich, who specializes in the applications of AI in materials science at KIT’s Institute of Nanotechnology, and Professor Christoph Brabec from the Helmholtz Institute Erlangen-Nürnberg (HI ERN). “With only 150 targeted experiments, we were able to achieve a breakthrough that would otherwise have required hundreds of thousands of tests. The workflow we have developed will open up new ways to quickly and economically discover high-performance materials for a wide range of applications,” Brabec said. With one of the discovered materials, they increased the efficiency of a reference solar cell by approximately two percentage points to 26.2 percent. “Our success shows that enormous amounts of time and resources can be saved by applying skillful strategies for the discovery of new energy materials,” Friedrich said.
The starting point at HI ERN was a database with structural formulae for approximately one million virtual molecules that could be synthesized from commercially available substances. From these virtual molecules, 13,000 were selected at random. The KIT researchers used established quantum mechanical methods to determine their energy levels, polarity, geometry and other properties.
Read more at Karlsruher Institut Für Technologie (KIT)
Image: One in a million: Artificial intelligence helps scientists in their search for new materials to be used in high-efficiency solar cells. (Kurt Fuchs/HI ERN)
