"Revolutionary Robot Accelerates Solar Cell Material Discovery by 14x"
Researchers at North Carolina State University have developed a robot called RoboMapper to accelerate the search for ideal perovskite materials for tandem solar cells. The robot combines base chemicals into hundreds of inks that can potentially form perovskites and applies them onto a single substrate. By testing hundreds of samples simultaneously, the researchers were able to identify an "ideal" perovskite mixture with the desired properties for use in tandem solar cells. The RoboMapper workflow speeds up the synthesis and characterization of materials by a factor of 14 compared to manual exploration and by a factor of nine compared to other automated methods. This approach can be applied to other material searches and has the potential to save time and energy in testing new materials.