Big News: TW Solar's Industry-Academia-Research Cooperation Outcomes Published in Nature

An article entitled "Flexible solar cells based on foldable silicon wafers with blunted edges," explaining innovation in the development of ultra-thin, flexible silicon solar cell technology, was published in prestigious international academic journal Nature?on May 24th. TW Solar contributed to the featured research, which made the cover of Nature's latest issue, underscoring the company's recent breakthroughs in the field.

Previous research had revealed that fractures in silicon solar cells due to bending stress typically begin with cracking at sharp channels located in wafers'?marginal regions. The research team developed an innovative edge-blunting technique to address this issue, which involves blunting the sharp channels between marginal regions surface pyramids, transforming their mesoscale structural symmetry by rounding them off. This approach changes their shear-banding fracture mode from brittleness to an elastic-plastic secondary mode.

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Furthermore, the blunting technique only affects the wafers’ marginal region, leaving the light-harvesting efficiency of their front and back sides intact, thus retaining the solar cells’ power conversion efficiency. The innovative technique results in a remarkable and significant improvement in the flexibility of the wafers, allowing 60 μm thick wafers to be folded like sheets of A4 paper, with a minimum bending radius of less than 5 mm. What's more, the wafers can be repeatedly bent through a bending angle of over 360 degrees. Through this simple process treatment, the researchers have thus managed to produce flexible crystalline silicon solar cells, and, since the feasibility of the manufacturing process has been verified on a mass production line, it offers a practical technical route for the development of lightweight and flexible monocrystalline silicon solar cell.

Since 2018, TW Solar has been collaborating with the Shanghai Institute of Microsystems and Information Technology under the Chinese Academy of Sciences to develop technologies for the mass production of silicon heterojunction (SHJ) solar cells, including a GW-level experimental production line capable of producing solar cells with power conversion efficiency (PCE) of 26.18% (ISFH-certified). The emergence of these new technologies fully showcases TW Solar's technical expertise and innovative vitality in the solar energy industry.