Perovskite solar cell lab course for undergraduate engineering students

Perovskite solar cells are a recently emerged photovoltaics technology that showed an impressive gain in improvement and have reached a certified efficiency of 23.7% in 2018 for research cells. Although containing toxic materials such as lead, these solar cells are currently getting a lot of attention by researchers since they can be produced by using relatively simple wet chemistry based on abundant materials, with process temperatures limited at 500 °C. This paper presents the results of a four days (or 30h) undergraduate engineering lab course using basic equipment (without major adaptions such as inert gas techniques) on the preparation and characterization of perovskite solar cells, where third year students are trained in photovoltaics and material science, research methods and characterization techniques (such as scanning electron microscopy), project management, while gaining a deeper understanding for emerging photovoltaics technologies.