2019.10.24About KUT / Academics / Research / Students Life

Recognition: research paper by Associate Professor Inami and other researchers posted on the website of Advances in Engineering

On September 10, 2019, a research paper by Associate Professor Eiichi Inami (School of Systems Engineering) and other researchers was posted on the website of Canadian research company Advances in Engineering (AIE) in recognition of the study's remarkable engineering achievement.

Every week AIE selects 20 excellent research results from major academic journals (acceptance rate less than 0.1%) and posts them on its website. The results of those studies are judged to be of practical importance based on attention from overseas third parties.

The paper, authored by Dr. Inami in collaboration with Prof. Takamasa Ishigaki and Prof. Hironori Ogata of Hosei University, is entitled, Sol-gel processed niobium oxide thin-film for a scaffold layer in perovskite solar cells.

In recent years, perovskite solar cells (PSCs) have been studied extensively worldwide because they are inexpensive, lightweight and flexible, and exhibit energy conversion efficiency close to that of existing silicon solar cells. Currently, niobium oxide thin films are attracting attention as scaffolds (underlayers) for perovskite layers (layers that absorb light)--an enhancement of PSC performance. However, production of the film requires large-scale equipment such as magnetron sputtering. This presents problems in terms of manufacturing cost and energy balance. This paper demonstrates fabrication of a niobium oxide thin film by means of an inexpensive and simple sol-gel method. Further, the film exhibits excellent properties as an underlayer. It is expected that the results of this niobium oxide underlayer research will greatly mitigate manufacturing cost and energy balance problems, and will further improve PSC performance.

Paper information
Name of journal: Thin Solid Films, vol.674 (2019) pp.7-11
Title of paper: Sol-gel processed niobium oxide thin-film for a scaffold layer in perovskite solar cells
Authors: Eiichi Inami, Takamasa Ishigaki and Hironori Ogata
DOI: 10.1016/j.tsf.2019.01.043.

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