Outdoor Performance of Perovskite Photovoltaic Technology

In the case of emerging photovoltaic technologies such as perovskite, most published works have focused on laboratory-scale cells, indoor conditions and no international standards have been fully established and adopted. Accordingly, this chapter shows a brief introduction on the standards and evaluation methods for perovskite solar minimodules under natural sunlight conditions. Therefore, we propose evaluating the outdoor performance in terms of power, following the international standard IEC 61853–1 to obtain the performance according to the power rating conditions. After some rigorous experimental evaluations, results shown that the maximum power (Pmax) evolution for the analyzed minimodules could be correlated with one of the three patterns commonly described for degradation processes in the literature, named convex, linear, and concave. These patterns were used to estimate the degradation rate and lifetime (T80). Moreover, ideality factor (nID) was estimated from the open-circuit voltage (Voc) dependence on irradiance and ambient temperature (outdoor data) to provide physical insight into the recombination mechanism dominating the performance during the exposure. In this context, it was observed that the three different degradation patterns identified for Pmax can also be identified by nID. Finally, based on the linear relationship between T80 and the time to first reach nID = 2 (TnID2), is demonstrated that nID analysis could offer important complementary information with important implications for this technology outdoor development, due that the changes in nID could be correlated with the recombination mechanisms and degradation processes occurring in the device.