Multi-million pound award to drive next generation solar technology into new applications.
Swansea University has teamed up with Imperial College London and Oxford University for a new programme grant, ATIP, which will work to advance organic and perovskite solar cells into applications that current solar technologies are not suitable for.
These next-generation photovoltaics show great promise: their performance competes with current technology, but they have the advantages of being flexible, lightweight, cheap to produce, and they can be printed directly onto products during manufacture.
These properties make them suitable for new applications that will be critical to advances such as:
- 5G, which requires ultra-lightweight sources of power for pseudo-satellites and high-altitude unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)
- The Internet of Things, for which sensors and computing devices are increasingly embedded into everyday objects;
- Zero-carbon buildings and vehicles, which could use their roofs, walls and windows to generate power.
The award is a Programme Grant from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. It will be used by the team to:
- Deliver the fundamental science and engineering to underpin the development of these promising solar technologies
- Develop low-carbon, low-cost manufacturing methods that will enable them to be produced at scale
- Develop prototypes to show how they can provide solar power in new applications.
The research programme is called Application Targeted and Integrated Photovoltaics (ATIP). It will be led by researchers at SPECIFIC, in partnership with Swansea’s new Centre for Integrative Semiconductor Materials (CISM), the Centre for Processable Electronics (CPE) at Imperial College London, and Oxford University’s Department of Physics. It also involves twelve key industry partners from different parts of the supply chain, who understand the technical and cost requirements to deliver new products to market.
The programme will be led by Professor James Durrant FRS from Swansea University’s SPECIFIC.