DuraMat - or the Durable Module Materials - Consortium is a Department of Energy (DOE) Energy Materials Network (EMN) that brings together national lab and university research infrastructure with the photovoltaic (PV) industries to discover, develop, de-risk, and enable the commercialization of new materials and designs for PV modules (1). One enabling aspect of DuraMat is to develop methodologies to understand reaction pathways and mechanisms in order to control the synthesis of novel functional materials. By coupling theory and experiments, we aim to accelerate materials discovery, characterization, scale-up, and commercial deployment. In this talk, I will describe several PV relevant examples where our coupled theory-experiment efforts have accelerated materials discovery, including transparent conducting spinel oxides (2), MnOx synthesis from solution, and the development of multifunctional coatings. Using novel materials discovered with this approach, DuraMat has the potential to develop modules with a levelized cost of electricity of less than 3 cents per kilowatt-hour.

(1) https://www.duramat.org/

(2) Y Shi et al., Chemistry of Materials 26, 1867–1873 (2014).