Abstract
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 describe 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. Detailed studies of the processes for creating and manipulating such microcells, together with theoretical and experimental investigations of the electrical, mechanical and optical characteristics of several types of module that incorporate them, illuminate the key aspects.
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Acknowledgements
We thank T. Banks, K. Colravy and D. Sievers for help with processing, T. Spila for assistance with secondary-ion mass spectrometry measurements and H. Kim and D. Stevenson for help with photography. The materials parts of this effort were supported by the US Department of Energy (DoE), Division of Materials Sciences, under award DE-FG02-07ER46471, through the Materials Research Laboratory (MRL). The general characterization facilities were provided through the MRL with support from the University of Illinois and from DoE grants DE-FG02-07ER46453 and DE-FG02-07ER46471. The mechanics theory and the transfer-printing systems were developed under support from the Center for Nanoscale Chemical Electrical Mechanical Manufacturing Systems at the University of Illinois (funded by the NSF under grant DMI-0328162). J.Y. and J.B.G. acknowledge support from a Beckman postdoctoral fellowship. A.J.B. acknowledges support from the Department of Defense Science, Mathematics and Research for Transformation (SMART) fellowship.
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J.Y., J.A.L., R.G.N., P.M.F., Y.H., A.R. and J.A.R. designed the experiments. J.Y., A.J.B., S.-I.P., P.E., L.L., R.H.K., T.-H.K., M.J.M., B.Y.A., E.B.D., J.A.L., R.G.N., P.M.F., Y.H., A.R. and J.A.R. carried out experiments. J.Y., A.J.B., S.-I.P., J.A.L., R.G.N., P.M.F., Y.H., A.R. and J.A.R. analysed the data. P.E., J.Y., R.H.K., T.-H.K., J.A.L., R.G.N., P.M.F., Y.H., A.R. and J.A.R. contributed to transfer printing. J.X., S.W., Y.H., J.A.L., R.G.N., P.M.F., Y.H., A.R. and J.A.R. contributed to mechanics modelling and analysis. J.B.G., J.A.L., R.G.N., P.M.F., Y.H., A.R. and J.A.R. contributed to optics simulation. J.Y., A.J.B., J.A.L., R.G.N., P.M.F., Y.H., A.R. and J.A.R. wrote the paper.
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Yoon, J., Baca, A., Park, SI. et al. Ultrathin silicon solar microcells for semitransparent, mechanically flexible and microconcentrator module designs. Nature Mater 7, 907–915 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat2287
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat2287
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