Dartmouth claims breakthrough in long-sought perovskite solar cell production

I’ve been hearing about the promise of perovskite solar cells for photovoltaic production for a couple years. This particular family of materials with a specific crystal structure works great in the lab at producing more electricity from the same amount of sunlight, but production and deployment in the real world hasn’t been feasible for a number of reasons.

Some Dartmouth engineers say they’ve improved part of the process: “the researchers’ method involves pairing high-speed flexographic printing with rapidly annealed sol-gel inks.” A release from the college with link to the paper is here.

This is funny to me because the Concord Monitor was printed on a Flexogrraphic press for 29 years. In 2019 we switched to a different technology, largely because Flexographic is a European company and the “plates” used to print pages were hard to get and expensive, as this story notes.