László Forró
Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland
Title: Environmental hazards of novel photovoltaic perovskites
Biography
Biography: László Forró
Abstract
The CH3NH3PbI3 perovskite is currently the most promising compound in photovoltaic (PV) technologies for making highly efficient solar cells due to its high effectiveness in converting light into electricity, simple fabrication procedure and low price. Several companies are already building perovskite based PV devices for commercialization in the near future. Nevertheless, this material contains Pb and safety concerns during PV device fabrication and transportation have not yet been addressed. Not only direct human exposure is an issue, but its release into the environment, soil and waterways, after failure of large area solar cells also represents major health risks. To overcome this problem, the scientific community suggests replacing the Pb with Sn, which is considered to be a non-toxic element. Here, we report on an extensive toxicity study of the two most promising photovoltaic perovskites CH3NH3PbI3 and CH3NH3SnI3. The zoom-in in vitro studies on epithelial and neuroblastoma cell cultures show severe toxic effects of both materials: modification of the genes upon perovskite exposure, biochemical and structural changes. The zoom-out in vivo studies on model living organisms (C. elegans and Drosophila melanogaster) show changes in life cycle and early death even at low concentration of perovskite uptake. The results are conclusive and encourage the scientific community to conduct further tests on more complex organisms, but especially to search for new materials which do not represent high level health hazards.