Tuesday 28 January 2020 16:00 – 17:00 A. Payatakes Seminar Room
” Nanomaterials for Energy Conversion and Energy Saving Devices”
Dr. George Sirrokostas Institute of Chemical Engineering Sciences (ICE-CT)
Abstract
The increasing demand for energy worldwide and the climate change makes the exploitation of renewable energy sources, covering today around 10% of the total energy consumption, a critical issue. It is predicted that energy demand will grow by more than 25% to 2040, due to rising incomes and a global population growing by 1.7 billion people, mostly in urban areas of developing economies. Low-carbon technologies, led by renewables and natural gas, will meet more than 80% of this increase in global energy demand. From the different renewable energy sources, solar energy is the most abundant one. Different types of photovoltaic devices have been used for solar energy harvesting. Among them, during the last few years, the pioneering breakthroughs on perovskite solar cells (PSCs) resulted in lab cells with a record efficiency above 20%, surpassing other more mature technologies such as dye sensitized solar cells (DSSCs), organic photovoltaics (OPV) and a-Si, after only few years of development. From the different device architectures that have been proposed, the carbon-based triple layer mesoscopic C-PSCs are a promising route towards potential commercialization. On the other hand, their efficiency is lower than that of planar devices, hence certain challenges must be addressed to improve further their efficiency and stability. A few parameters have been examined for improving the properties of the perovskite layer, while a novel integrated PV device, that combines energy production and the electrochromism functionality into one device, has been introduced.