Issue 4, 2024

Life cycle assessment of low-dimensional materials for perovskite photovoltaic cells

Abstract

While perovskite solar cells (PSC) have a high potential of achieving commercial-scale manufacturing, they still face some deficiencies regarding rapid degradation in the presence of moisture, oxygen, and high-temperature exposure. To address these challenges, recent research has identified lower dimensional (LD) materials as promising candidates to improve the stability and power conversion efficiency (PCE) of PCSs. The goal of this study is to analyze the environmental performance of LD material-based PSCs (ld-PSC) through a comprehensive life cycle assessment, comparing their environmental performance with reference PSC and commercial photovoltaics (PV) technologies including single-crystalline (c-Si), copper indium gallium diselenide (CIGS) and cadmium telluride (CdTe). To achieve this objective, we evaluated five LD materials such as graphene, reduced graphene oxide (rGO), graphene quantum dots (GQDs), molybdenum disulfide (MoS2), and black phosphorus (BP) that are commonly studied in experimental works, and two alternative (Alt) ld-PSC configurations such as Alt-1 and Alt-2, featuring LD materials with lower environmental and comparatively higher among those studied. A comparison of LD materials on a unit mass basis reveals that rGO, graphene, and MoS2 are the most environmentally friendly options. However, their environmental impact changes significantly when incorporated into ld-PSC configurations based on the type and amount of chemicals used for the dispersion which emphasizes the importance of carefully selecting the chemicals used for dispersion. Our results show that the Alt-1 configuration is ∼25% lower and the Alt-2 configuration has ∼15% higher average environmental impacts compared to reference PSCs. Further analyses show that at 20% benchmark PCE, ld-PSC has the potential to outperform the environmental performance of all conventional technologies, even with a lifetime up to 2.5 times shorter. Additionally, ld-PSC has a faster energy payback period compared to commercial PV technologies.

Graphical abstract: Life cycle assessment of low-dimensional materials for perovskite photovoltaic cells

Supplementary files

Article information

Article type
Paper
Submitted
06 noy 2023
Accepted
23 fev 2024
First published
26 fev 2024
This article is Open Access
Creative Commons BY-NC license

Energy Adv., 2024,3, 800-811

Life cycle assessment of low-dimensional materials for perovskite photovoltaic cells

A. Ravilla, C. A. R. Perini, J. Correa-Baena, A. W. Y. Ho-Baillie and I. Celik, Energy Adv., 2024, 3, 800 DOI: 10.1039/D3YA00540B

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported Licence. You can use material from this article in other publications, without requesting further permission from the RSC, provided that the correct acknowledgement is given and it is not used for commercial purposes.

To request permission to reproduce material from this article in a commercial publication, please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

If you are an author contributing to an RSC publication, you do not need to request permission provided correct acknowledgement is given.

If you are the author of this article, you do not need to request permission to reproduce figures and diagrams provided correct acknowledgement is given. If you want to reproduce the whole article in a third-party commercial publication (excluding your thesis/dissertation for which permission is not required) please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

Read more about how to correctly acknowledge RSC content.

Social activity

Spotlight

Advertisements