Kentucky-based Perovskite manufacturer, Sofab Inks, has raised $6m in seed funding. The round was led by strategic investor Cloudberry Ventures.

At the same time, the company, which was spun out of University of Louisville, Conn Center for Renewable Energy, announced that its Tinfab is a comparable replacement for C60, the complex molecule used for adhesion.

Perovskites are beginning to approach theoretical efficiency limits for a single solar panel technology, said Sofab Inks’ co-founder and CEO, Blake Martin. They have demonstrated really high efficiencies in a short period of time and compatibility with crystalline silicon and tandem architectures which he describes as being the beach head for industrial scale solar deployment.

The material C60 is responsible for the bulk of the instability in perovskite modules, Martin told Electronics Weekly. “[It] is a complex molecule. It lacks the necessary binding sites to form strong adhesion between itself and the perovskite layer that it’s in direct contact with. Therefore, when the solar panel encounters say on-off cycles with illumination, or say thermal stressors that are common in real-world deployments, the C60 layer is very prone to delaminating off the perovskite film. Air is not a good conductor of electricity; it degrades the performance really quickly and actually induces sort of eddy currents within the perovskite film that further create degradation within the module. So C60 really is the big point of discussion here.”

“It is,” he continued, “the largest source of voltage loss in a device. It is also the point where fielded modules crack first.”

Sofab Inks replaces C60 with its tin oxide, TinFab material. “Our metal-oxide nanoparticles bond six to ten times more strongly than C60 and hold up at real sizes, running at 22.3% on 30cm single junction modules, he told Electronics Weekly. They also have power conversion efficiency rates of 25.5%.

The funding moves the company into high-velocity production and enables it to triple its engineering team to manage the 1x to 100x scale-up for 1×2 meter commercial specs, said Martin.

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