Development of wide-bandgap perovskite absorber materials for tandem solar cell application.

Oman's vision 2040 for the future aims to obtain 30% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030 to meet global demand and promote sustainable development. Oman has a large amount of unused land and one of the highest solar resources in the world, making it an ideal place to develop and deploy solar energy. Our country is exploring this potential and building photovoltaic plants to produce electricity on a medium-to-large scale. In alignment with this vision and mission, this project envisions to contribute in enhancing the knowledge base in PV technology, cultivating talent in this field, and opportunities in creating future technologies. Particularly, the project is a focused research and development initiative on developing wide band gap emerging perovskite PV technologies for tandem solar cells applications. Metal halide perovskite solar cells (PSCs) have emerged as promising PV materials in the past decade, with an increase in efficiency (from 3% to over 25.7%) within a decade, which is exceptional when compared with Silicon PV technology. Despite this, this technology faces a lot of challenges, including stability, toxicity, and scaling-up possibilities, which will limit its ability to prevail over conventional PV technologies. Perovskite solar cells usually require new value chains to develop, but when combined with silicone, perovskite-based tandem technologies can be leveraged, creating a highly promising market potential. For tandem technologies based on perovskites, wide band gap perovskite solar cells are critical. This project aims to investigate compositional engineering of wide band gap perovskite structures to improve the efficiency of power conversion in wide band gap perovskite solar cells. With this project, we also envision establishing a facility for manufacturing perovskite absorber materials and PSCs at SQU as the first step toward creating a fully functional, high-efficiency perovskite solar cell. In the first phase of the project, we will explore existing fabrication and characterization facilities within the department and other centers, and few infrastructures mentioned are required because this is a new research area for the department. We hope that this project will open up new research and development opportunities in emerging PV technology resulting in publications and collaboration initiatives.