Bending standard for flexible solar panels
Researchers in Spain have developed a standard test for flexible photovoltaic solar cells used in a wide variety of applications.
The FlexPV cells, often based on perovskite materials, are used in applications from wearable technology and intelligent fabrics to curved surfaces such as car roofs or lightweight applications such as drones or aerospace transportation.
However, the lack of a standardized protocol regarding their stability and mechanical performance makes it difficult to compare and evaluate their flexibility, durability and efficiency in real-life conditions, which in turn limits their design and development.
So researchers at the Universitat Rovira i Virgili (URV) in Catalonia, Spain, have led a team of 23 experts in photovoltaic energy and mechanical performance from 12 countries in designing a unified testing protocol so that flexible solar cells and panels can be evaluated in a more consistent manner.
The bending test protocol for characterizing the mechanical performance of flexible photovoltaics focuses on measuring efficiency over 1,000 bending cycles at a voltage of 1%, thus providing a benchmark for measuring the mechanical resistance of these devices, says Prof Lluís Marsal, leader of the Nanoelectronics and Photonic Systems group at the URV. This protocol is the first attempt at standardization between the fields of photovoltaics and flexible electronics.
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“The progress of these devices will demand new protocols with more appropriate ways of testing the stabilization, torsion and adhesion properties of the flexible solar cells of the future,” said Marsal.
The standardized method, which has been published in detail in the journal Nature Energy, also proposes methods for assessing flexibility in different environmental conditions and the use of encapsulation to protect devices from degradation caused by humidity and temperature.
The new protocol will also help create a standard for evaluating flexible solar devices such as photodetectors and supercondensers.
The team of experts was led by Kenjiro Fukuda, from the RIKEN Centre for Emerging Matter Science in Saitama-Japan, and Osbel Almora, Juan de la Cierva researcher at the URV.
Flexible photovoltaic devices differ from rigid ones in their structure, materials and application potential. While rigid solar panels are mostly made of silicon and are placed on fixed surfaces such as the ground, roofs or terraces, FlexPVs use other materials that allow them to be much more versatile: they can bend and adapt to curved surfaces whilst losing hardly any efficacy. Moreover, they are much lighter than rigid ones and this makes them ideal for applications where weight is a limiting factor
The mechanics of these flexible devices also allow them to withstand more extreme conditions of movement and flexibility, opening the door to applications such as aerospace transportation or vehicles with curved surfaces.
www.urv.cat; www.emerging-pv.org
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