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Project

Integrated Thin-film Electronics in PV Modules and batteries

Economical motivations and demand for environment-friendly buildings and sustainable industries, pushes businesses to invest in cost-efficient renewable power sources such as wind or solar photovoltaic (PV) technology. As a sustainable and highly appealing source of electricity, solar energy has the greatest potential to deliver long-term benefits for investors. Even though with the help of intensive research and development, solar cells have become much more energy efficient over the past years, it is still room for improvement. In particular, highly efficient flexible and semi-transparent solar cell made with perovskites which have the potential to be integrated in building materials like curved surfaces or windows, suffer from environmental conditions and damages such as shading and soiling. Additional circuitry is needed to detect such conditions and optimize cell-strings inside a photovoltaic module in order to improve granular cells’ functionality and boost modules’ performance. Thin-film electronics which can be manufactured in large areas with low-cost per unit area and at low processing temperatures is an excellent candidate for such intelligent circuit integration. Integrating smart circuitry for monitoring granular photovoltaic cell modules will improve energy harvesting performance and lowers power degradation of such cells while allowing flexibility in large scale designs and minimizing losses caused by environmental factors. The requirements for distributed read-out electronics in thin film batteries are rather similar and the overall system architecture is equivalent. This enables to broaden the scope of this research and implement the obtained results in both battery and PV systems.

Date:3 Mar 2021 →  Today
Keywords:Thin-film electronics, solar cell, photovoltaic cells, Integration, flexible solar cells, battery technology
Disciplines:Renewable power and energy systems engineering, Photodetectors, optical sensors and solar cells, Battery technology, Semiconductor devices, nanoelectronics and technology, Display technology
Project type:PhD project