Engineering Water Repellent Coatings by Functional Nano-Sponges: a Springboard to Stable Perovskite Devices (SPIKE)

The SPIKE project aims at realizing a revolutionary water repellent coating as a functional barrier to encapsulate photovoltaic (PV) electronic devices.

Global solar encapsulation industry, massively pushed by the urgent increase in the solar energy demand, is expected to reach $11.37 billion by 2028 with a growing rate of 14.5% during the forecast period (2021 - 2028).

Solar encapsulation is key to provide excellent durability to a PV module, an essential pre-requisite for its commercial viability. This is particularly true for the market exploitation of any new emerging solar technologies.

Hybrid perovskite solar is an example: a key player in emerging PVs and a potential revolutionary system for smart PV integration in everyday life – being low-cost, coloured, and flexible. Their low durability, however, questions their marketable appeal.

SPIKE aims to solve this issue demonstrating and bringing to the market an innovative technology based on smart nano-coatings which can revolutionize the solar encapsulation industry, and beyond.

The coating is made of porous nano-sponges with tuneable functionality, transparency, flexibility, versatility and at reduced cost, overcoming the limits of the current commercial encapsulants (heavy, thick, costly, and involving high temperature processing).

It is the goal of SPIKE to unleash the innovation potential of the proof of concept, by developing, technically validating, and bringing to the market such innovative technology, by: i) realizing low-cost, large area, robust coatings with a low energy consuming solution-based fabrication process; ii) integrating them in highly efficient perovskite solar modules; iii) demonstrating and validating a prototype in an industrially relevant environment; and iv) providing a reliable business model and market analysis to push our prototype to a commercial stage, building the bricks for the creation of a new start-up company, ultimate outcome of SPIKE.