Episode 13: Moon PV may rely on regolith for substrate

To enable future lunar settlements, researchers are pursuing ways to construct needed devices on the moon to save the expense of shipping them from Earth. In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Laura Leay interviews Felix Lang from the University of Potsdam, Germany about his group’s development of perovskite solar cells that utilize the moon’s regolith for the substrate. The researchers achieved power conversion efficiency of ~10%, with some device architectures leading to improved efficiencies of ~12%. Calculations show that using resources from the moon resulted in a power-to-weight ratio that outclassed other technologies, even with the low efficiency. Future work will look to improve this efficiency by considering tandem solar cells. This study was published in a recent issue of Device.