Sofab Inks, a US-based manufacturer of functionalized metal oxide materials, announced its novel tin oxide (SnO2) electron transport layer (ETL) material was used in a 22.2%-efficient mini perovskite solar module measuring 30 x 30 cm made with industrially-compatible processes.
The company’s Tinfab was applied as the ETL with a sheet-to-sheet slot die coating tool, according to Sofab Inks COO, Jack Manzella, who noted that the perovskite manufacturing equipment partner was Alpha Precision Systems, a U.S.-based unit of China-based Suzhou Precision Systems (SPS).
The use of Tinfab enables a fullerene-free design, which has several benefits, according to Manzella, such as stability performance, manufacturability, and costs.
The team used inverted cell architecture, also known as a “p-i-n” architecture, with solar cell illumination through the hole‐transport layer (HTL). “We used our Tinfab, an SnO₂ nanoparticle dispersible in orthogonal solvents,” Manzella told pv magazine. “The uniqueness of this milestone is that we used a new architecture, adding atomic layer deposition SnO₂ on top of our Tinfab in a PIN architecture,” he added.
In the demonstration, the stack was deposited using physical vapor deposition (PVD), slot-die coating (SDC), and atomic layer deposition (ALD) techniques. The electrode layer was fabricated by PVD, the buffer layer by ALD, the electron transport layer (ETL) and perovskite layer by SDC, and the hole transport layer (HTL) by PVD.
In other company news, Sofab Inks partnered with Italy’s Solertix and Centre for Hybrid and Organic Solar Energy (CHOSE) of Tor Vergata University to conduct stability testing of perovskite devices made with Tinfab. The 2,500 h results “exceeded expectations,” according to Manzella, who noted that details will be presented this month at the Perovskite Connect industry conference in Berlin.
The scaling up to 30 cm x 30 cm comes just a few months after the company reported a 20.4%-efficient triple cation solar cell device made with its material, as reported by pv magazine.
The Sofab Inks team is currently working with customers located in Australia, China, and the United States, as it moves into pilot production and on its own R&D. “Over the coming months, we aim to achieve similar efficiencies on 60 × 60 cm modules and begin accelerated stability testing. In the medium term, we’ll continue optimizing our ink formulations to enhance performance and scalability,” said Manzella.
Sofab Inks is a spinoff of the University of Louisville. It was founded in 2022 and specializes in functionalized metal oxides, mainly tin oxide and nickel oxide, for high-volume manufacturing.
This content is protected by copyright and may not be reused. If you want to cooperate with us and would like to reuse some of our content, please contact: editors@pv-magazine.com.
By submitting this form you agree to pv magazine using your data for the purposes of publishing your comment.
Your personal data will only be disclosed or otherwise transmitted to third parties for the purposes of spam filtering or if this is necessary for technical maintenance of the website. Any other transfer to third parties will not take place unless this is justified on the basis of applicable data protection regulations or if pv magazine is legally obliged to do so.
You may revoke this consent at any time with effect for the future, in which case your personal data will be deleted immediately. Otherwise, your data will be deleted if pv magazine has processed your request or the purpose of data storage is fulfilled.
Further information on data privacy can be found in our Data Protection Policy.