Flexible Solar Cells
The high natural abundance of silicon, together with its excellent reliability and good efficiency in solar cells, suggest its continued use in production of solar energy, on massive scales, for the foreseeable future. Although organics, nanocrystals, nanowires and other new materials hold significant promise, many opportunities continue to exist for research into unconventional means of exploiting silicon in advanced photovoltaic systems.Here,we developed modules that use large-scale arrays of silicon solar microcells created from bulk wafers and integrated in diverse spatial layouts on foreign substrates by transfer printing. The resulting devices can offer useful features, including high degrees of mechanical flexibility, user-definable transparency and ultrathin-form-factor microconcentrator designs.
References:
- Baca et al., Compact monocrystalline silicon solar modules with high voltage outputs and mechanically flexible designs, Energy & Environmental Science 3, 208-211 (2010) (featured on the cover of Solar EES)
- Yoon et al., Ultrathin silicon solar microcells for semitransparent, mechanically flexible and microconcentrator module designs. Nat. Mater. 7, 907-915 (2008). (featured on the cover of Nature Materials)
