Highly Portable, Flexible Silicon Solar Cell Arrays for Polar Operations

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Solar cells have unique advantages as an alternative source of electric power. This program will demonstrate high specific power, lightweight, flexible, thin silicon solar cells. These solar cells can be directly substituted for existing state of the art silicon solar cells with the effect of significantly improving specific power, power/area, and power supply life. The proposal describes a lightweight, flexible, high-performance, ultra-thin silicon solar cell that incorporates light-trapping and a graphite cloth substrate as an integral part of the device. This new type of silicon solar cell will be developed for polar operations. The silicon layers will be deposited by electro-deposition. These thin films will demonstrate the lightweight and flexibility of other thin film solar cell designs while maintaining the high performance of crystalline silicon.