Project description
Breaking the heat barrier to advance solar cell technology
Global warming, rising emissions, and the need for sustainable energy solutions have made the development of high-energy density batteries crucial. Current lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries used in electric vehicles fall short in providing the extended range required to fully replace combustion engines. With the support of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, the SALSA project will develop lithium-sulphur (Li-S) batteries, which offer higher energy density. To address safety concerns, the project focuses on silicon-based anodes and sulphur cathodes, aiming for a capacity of 600 mAh/g and a cycle life of over 500 cycles. Collaborative efforts from research teams in Ireland, Czechia, and Slovakia are driving the development of a sustainable battery solution for the future of electric vehicles.
Objective
Chalcogenide Perovskites (CPs) have an enormous potential for Photovoltaics (PV). They have a high absorption coefficient and direct, tunable bandgap range of 1.45 - 2.2eV complementing Si solar cells. Moreover, CPs are composed of earth-abundant and nontoxic elements and have high thermal stability when exposed to air and humidity. However, no working CP-based solar cells have been reported due to their very high synthesis temperatures in a sulfur-reach environment. Realizing the potential of efficient and nontoxic CP-based solar cells currently faces two main challenges: the high synthesis temperature and the lack of control over doping. The overall goal of my project is to make CPs into photovoltaic absorbers by developing synthetic routes that provide highly crystalline thin films below temperatures of 500 C and controlling their doping levels.
To address these two missions, I will use a one-of-a-kind suite of thin-film deposition systems at my host institution (DTU Denmark). The system is dedicated to high throughput synthesis of sulfides with air-free transfer between three film processing tools. I will use combinatorial methods to systematically study the effect of changing elemental composition, chemical potentials, and process parameters on the crystallization temperature. After depositing high-quality thin film at lower temperatures, I will use the unique possibilities to control the charge carriers concentration in the CPs thin films at the host lab by incorporating various extrinsic dopants.
The wide use of combinatorial synthesis and high throughput characterization in this research will bring substantial, high-quality data for machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) purposes. Depositing CPs on TCOs can pave the way for a new kind of stable and nontoxic solar cells with moderate production costs.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- engineering and technologyenvironmental engineeringenergy and fuelsrenewable energysolar energyphotovoltaic
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Keywords
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Main Programme
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - European FellowshipsCoordinator
2800 Kongens Lyngby
Denmark