Demonstration and error analysis of scaling-up plastic-integrated concentrator photovoltaic panels to 1 m2

Plastic lens integrated III-V compound semiconductor cell (PIC) modules or other microconcentrator/miniconcentrator photovoltaic (CPV) modules reduce the volume and weight of CPV modules to a size comparable to flat panel photovoltaics. However, the areal density of solar cells and lenses in a PIC or other micro-mini-CPV modules significantly increases by at least an order of magnitude, which raises the required precision and consistency of the module assembling, because a slightly misaligned solar cell can limit the current of the whole circuit and inhibit the performance of the full module. In this study, we presented the results of a 1 m(2) module consisting of 2025 solar cells with a direct-normal-irradiance efficiency of more than 30%. To the best of our knowledge, this is the largest area for a CPV module with a height of less than 5 cm reported so far. To quantify the different causes of misalignment, we proposed a probabilistic analysis to model how these errors affect the performance of the CPV module. The results show that the dominant error of the PIC module is attributed to around 0.5 degrees misaligned orientation between the unit modules. This analysis approach can also be applied to other types of micro-CPV modules.

Automated summary

It has been shown that the integration of plastic lens with III-V compound semiconductor cells in CPV modules can reduce volume and weight significantly, but also demands higher precision and consistency to avoid misalignment affecting their performance.