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

Abstract

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 m2 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° misaligned orientation between the unit modules. This analysis approach can also be applied to other types of micro‐CPV modules.