A research team from the Ningbo Institute of Materials Technology and Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, together with collaborators, has developed a flexible perovskite/CIGS tandem solar cell that has achieved a certified power conversion efficiency of 23.8% on a 1 cm² device—setting a new record for this category.
Source: China Science Daily
A research team from the Ningbo Institute of Materials Technology and Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, together with collaborators, has developed a flexible perovskite/CIGS tandem solar cell that has achieved a certified power conversion efficiency of 23.8% on a 1 cm² device—setting a new record for this category. The cell maintained over 90% of its initial performance after 320 hours of continuous operation. The breakthrough was recently reported in Nature Energy.
Flexible tandem solar cells that combine perovskite and CIGS (copper indium gallium selenide) materials offer a unique balance of high efficiency and mechanical flexibility, making them ideal for lightweight, portable, and aerospace applications—such as drones and low-Earth orbit satellites—where every gram matters. But achieving efficient, stable performance has remained a key technical hurdle, primarily due to the difficulty of growing uniform perovskite layers on the rough surface of CIGS substrates.
To overcome this, the team developed a novel antisolvent-seeded growth strategy. This approach decouples the adsorption and dissolution behavior of self-assembled monolayers (SAMs) and integrates it with the nucleation process of perovskite crystals. During dissolution, high-polarity solvents help suppress SAM clustering; during adsorption, low-polarity antisolvents create favorable thermodynamic conditions for uniform attachment. By introducing a pre-mixed perovskite seed layer, the team significantly enhanced wetting, crystal quality, and interfacial adhesion.
The resulting device not only achieved record efficiency for its class, but also demonstrated excellent durability—retaining more than 90% of its original output after prolonged operation and surviving 3,000 bending cycles at a 1 cm radius without notable degradation. This development marks a key step toward commercially viable, high-performance flexible solar technology.
Reproduced article do not represent the position of New Energy Era.