INSTRUMENTATION • ELECTRONICS
Flexible silicon
solar cells A
n international group of researchers has developed a new approach to flexible solar cells based on foldable silicon wafers
with blunted edges. Flexible solar cells have great market potential for applications in photovoltaics integrated into buildings and wearable electronics due to their lightweight, shockproof and self-powered properties. Silicon solar cells have been successfully used in large power plants, however despite the effort of past years there has been little progress in the development of flexible silicon solar cells because of their rigidity. Now, researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Changsha University of Science and Technology and the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology have presented a new strategy for fabricating large-scale, foldable silicon wafers and manufacturing flexible solar cells. The technique is based on the fact that
textured crystalline silicon wafers always start to crack at the sharp channels between surface pyramids in the marginal region of the wafer. Using this, the researchers were able to improve the flexibility of the silicon wafers by blunting the pyramidal structure in the marginal regions. This edge-blunting technique enables the commercial production of large-scale (more than 240cm2), high efficiency (more than 24%) silicon solar cells that can be rolled similarly to a sheet of paper. The cells retain 100% of their power conversion efficiency after 1,000 side-to-side bending cycles. After being assembled into large flexible modules of more than 10,000cm2, the cells retained 99.62% of their power after thermal cycling between -70 and 85°C for 120 hours. Additionally, the cells retained 96.03% of their power after 20 minutes of exposure to air flow when attached to a soft gasbag, which models wind blowing
Solar cell module performance
during a violent storm. The proposed method therefore offers
an engineering technique for large-scale commercial production of solar cells with remarkable efficiency.
For more information visit
www.nature.com/articles/ s41586-023-05921-z
www.engineerlive.com 23
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