Ural Federal University: University Research Project to Receive Funding from the Russian Science Foundation
The research project “Stability of Perovskite Solar Cells under Irradiation by Powerful Streams of Accelerated Particles,” led by Ivan Zhidkov, a Senior Researcher at the Department of Electrophysics at UrFU, will receive support from the Russian Science Foundation. The research team won the Russian Science Foundation’s competition in the priority activity area “Carrying Out Fundamental and Exploratory Scientific Research on the Instructions of the President of the Russian Federation”.
“Our project is aimed at studying radiation-stimulated processes in perovskite solar cells and selecting the most stable compositions and architecture of solar cells for operation in space conditions,” says Ivan Zhidkov.
As the scientist explains, solar panels are widely used as an energy source for orbiting spacecraft. The weight of solar panels is very important, which affects the payload of launch vehicles and the cost of launching spacecraft into orbit. Thus, in addition to the efficiency of solar cells, a parameter such as the specific power (energy produced per unit mass) is also important. In this regard, perovskite solar panels are a promising technology for space applications.
Five applications were submitted by the UrFU to the Russian Science Foundation’s competition this year. The fund supported 31 research groups. Projects in different fields of knowledge and by different organizations were supported. The size of one grant will be up to 15 million rubles per year.
“The requirements of the competition and the removal of formal specific scientometric requirements for project leaders by the Russian Science Foundation led to a multiple increase in the number of applications. More than a thousand applications were submitted to the competition, more than two-thirds of which were from supervisors who had previously participated in recent Russian Science Foundation competitions for small individual scientific groups and individual scientific teams. Among them, there was a significant number of projects similar to those already submitted for other competitions. Under these conditions, the Expert Council of the Russian Science Foundation gave primary attention to the interdisciplinarity of the project. The selection was carried out not just from the number of projects positively evaluated by the experts, but also from those that were rated as highly as possible by the experts and sections of the expert council, including on the basis of possible synergy of research work performed in different organizations in different branches of knowledge,” commented Andrey Blinov, Deputy General Director, Head of Department of the Russian Science Foundation.