Market data shows that by 2020 several countries led by Germany, Italy, Spain, Greece, UK, Australia were getting over 5%, sometimes close to 10% of their energy from solar power.

This progress is of course linked to materials research – it is imperative to have photovoltaic materials that are efficient in converting solar energy to electricity.

Conversion efficiency improved from 2-3% to 20-25%, and, in some cases, 40%, over the last years.

There is still a lot to be done to produce even more efficient converters.

BIOVIA’s  @RK is one of the authors of the recent paper “Photo-energy conversion efficiency of CH3NH3PbI3/C60 heterojunction perovskite solar cells from first-principles” in Materials Advances.

This work used BIOVIA Materials Studio DMol3 solver to look into conversion efficiency of the interface between a halide perovskite, MAPbI3, and a C60 buckyball.

You can learn more about this research at https://blog.3ds.com/brands/biovia/solar-cell-materials/