NEW ROBOT SEARCHES FOR SOLAR CELL MATERIALS 14 TIMES FASTER

Summary from the TLDR newsletter

Researchers at North Carolina State University have enlisted the help of robots to help search for the ideal perovskite. Perovskites are a type of material with a rhombus-in-a-cube crystal structure that can be used to create highly efficient solar cells. There are a vast number of possible perovskite materials. Predicting and testing the potential properties of all these materials is time-consuming and difficult. The robot combines chemicals in different proportions to form perovskites and then applies them onto a surface for testing. It speeds up the synthesis and characterization of materials by a factor of 14 compared to manual exploration.