Reducing Losses in Perovskite Large Area Solar Technology: Laser Design Optimization for Highly Efficient Modules and Minipanels

The perovskite solar era has demonstrated 25.5% efficiency in only 10 years of research, reaching the performance levels of other photovoltaics technologies such as Si and GaAs, showing potentially low-cost manufacturing and process versatility. However, these results are achieved only on small area cells, with an active area equal or lower to 0.1 cm(2). The upscaling development of perovskite solar technology requires the use of additional processes to reduce losses encountered for large areas; for this reason, laser processing becomes necessary to design connected cells into modules. In this work, cell-to-module losses in perovskite solar modules are reduced by optimizing the laser design, establishing a relationship between geometrical fill factor, cell area width, and P1-P2-P3 laser parameters. Upscaling the process from 2.5 x 2.5 to 10 x 10 cm(2) an efficiency of 18.71% and 17.79% is achieved on active area of 2.25 and 48 cm(2) respectively, with only 5% relative losses when scaling from to minimodule to module size. A minipanel is fabricated on 20 x 20 cm(2), showing 11.9% stabilized efficiency and 2.3 W on an active area of 192 cm(2), among the highest reported in literature so far at this size.

Automated summary

The perovskite solar technology has achieved comparable performance levels to other photovoltaic technologies, such as silicon and gallium arsenide, in just 10 years of research. It has the potential for low-cost manufacturing and process versatility. However, scaling up the technology for large areas requires additional processes to reduce losses, and laser processing is used to design connected cells into modules. By optimizing the laser design, the losses in perovskite solar modules can be reduced.