FlexibleElectronics with NanoManufacturing

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. John A. Rogers Group.

http://www.nature.com/nmat/journal/v7/n11/abs/nmat2287.html

研究人员发明了一种可以镶嵌在纺织品表面的硅太阳能电池，这种以硅为基础的轻便型太阳能电池应用前景广泛，也是迄今为止效率最高的柔性太阳电池，新成果发表在日前在线出版的《自然—材料学》期刊上。 在早期的设计中，柔性太阳能电池是用效率低下的有机材料或厚厚的无机薄膜做成的，比如硅，但这样又限制了它们的柔软性。John Rogers和同事合作，使用超薄、超高柔软性的转移印刷技术，将硅元素从硅晶体中提取出来并转移到一种高分子底层上，制造出厘米尺寸大小的太阳能电池。新方法整合了硅的柔韧性和良好的光吸收性。而转移印刷技术本身具有通用性，因此，新方法可应用于许多材料和产品的设计中。（来源：科学时报 王丹红）

http://www.sciencenet.cn/htmlpaper/200936164329635383.html