Perovskite solar panels have promising potential for indoor use, especially for powering Internet of Things (IoT) devices, due to their strong light absorption and good performance under low-light conditions typical of indoor environments. However, several specific challenges must be addressed for their effective deployment indoors:
Key Challenges for Using Perovskite Solar Panels Indoors
- Material Stability: Perovskite materials are sensitive to environmental factors such as humidity, temperature fluctuations, and light exposure, which can lead to degradation over time. Even under indoor conditions, ensuring long-term stability remains a major hurdle, as typical lifespans currently are around one year, much shorter than silicon solar cells.
- Balancing Efficiency and Stability: Improving conversion efficiency in perovskite solar cells often compromises their stability. Achieving a good balance is crucial but challenging for indoor applications where consistent performance over time is needed.
- Defects and Ion Migration: Ion migration and bulk defects in perovskite layers can cause non-radiative recombination losses, reducing the power output. Strategies such as doping (e.g., chlorine doping) have been researched to mitigate these effects and improve indoor performance.
- Interface Defects: The interfaces between different layers in the solar cell, such as the compact and mesoporous layers, introduce defects that are particularly critical for indoor photovoltaic performance. Managing these interface defects is necessary to optimize power density indoors.
- Scaling and Uniformity: Large-area perovskite panels tend to have efficiency losses compared to small laboratory samples due to difficulty in achieving uniform and dense perovskite films, which also impacts indoor applications requiring practical device sizes.
- Energy Variability and Orientation Sensitivity: Indoor light conditions vary significantly depending on lighting type, intensity, and solar cell orientation. Studies show a notable drop in performance with suboptimal orientation indoors, pointing to the need for careful device placement or design to maximize energy harvesting.
- Need for Energy Storage: Although perovskite solar cells can generate sufficient power for many IoT devices under typical indoor lighting, occasional low-light days may not provide enough energy even for the solar cell’s own power management functions, necessitating some form of energy storage.
Summary
While perovskite solar panels are well-suited for indoor photovoltaic applications due to their tunable bandgap and strong low-light performance, challenges related to material stability, defect management, efficiency-stability trade-offs, and practical deployment conditions remain. Addressing these issues through improved material engineering, device architecture, and energy storage integration is critical for their successful commercialization in indoor environments such as powering IoT devices.
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