Automatic folding and extending mechanism of solar panels

Are foldable solar cells a future development?

In the end, some perspectives for the future development of foldable solar cells, especially the standard folding procedure, improvement in the folding endurance through revealing failure mechanism, are provided.

What happens if a solar module is folded?

When the solar modules subjected to folding, the Jsc started to decrease and gradually saturated at around 4 mA cm -2 after 10 cycles of folding/unfolding, while the Voc almost remained constant throughout 40 times folding/unfolding, as shown in Figure 3D. Foldable solar cells with crease in the predesigned place.

What is the difference between bending and folding in solar cells?

However, in contrast to mild bending with curvature radius of several millimeters, folding generates the crease with extreme curvature radius of sub‐millimeter, resulting in the appearance of large strain and stress. As a result, it is highly challenging to realize robustly foldable and highly efficient solar cells.

What is the deformation of flexible solar cells?

The deformation of flexible solar cells mainly includes bending, folding, stretching, twisting and crumpling (Figure 1). It is widely accepted that folding is the extreme condition of bending which generating crease with extreme low curvature radius of sub-millimeter.

How to build highly foldable solar cells?

The key requirements to construct highly foldable solar cells, including structure design based on tuning the neutral axis plane, and adopting flexible alternatives including substrates, transparent electrodes and absorbers, are intensively discussed.

Why are foldable solar cells important?

It is widely accepted that folding is the extreme condition of bending which generating crease with extreme low curvature radius of sub-millimeter. Thus, foldable solar cells meet the requirements of size compactness and shape transformation for many emerging applications.