Investigation On Mechanical Buckling Behavior Of Flexible Solar Cells

Flexible solar cells belong to film/substrate systems. The buckling of film/ substrate systems can reach very large strain although the strain of film is very small. This paper presents a new way of storage and deployment of flexible solar cells on the basis of this feature. It can be described as follows. The buckling of flexible solar cells can make itself small enough for storage, providing large deposit amount as much as possible in a relative finite space. The flexible solar cells could recover from its buckling after the constraints are released if the material maintains in linear elastic. Taking advantage of this feature, automatical deployment of flexible solar cells can be achieved.ABAQUS finite element software is used to simulate the behavior of buckled flexible solar cells in this paper. The element type and finite element calculation method are analyzed in details. The appropriate failure criteria of each structure are further discussed in this paper, which provides the foundations to find the amplitude and compressive strain of buckling structure in critical conditions.In this paper, flexible solar cells can be subcategorized into metal and polymer in terms of substrate, and the buckling behavior can be predicted through finite element method. By changing some parameters such as the buckling mode, substrate thickness, film thickness, the mechanical behavior of flexible solar cells in two types of substrates are investigated, and the reasons of the failure are studied, concluding the single crystal silicon film is the most failure reason for the structure, providing certain references for optimal design in structural engineering. Meanwhile when the structure buckled the influence of those factors on compressive strain-amplitude relationship is studied. We find that the compressive strain-amplitude relationship is only sensitive to buckling mode, which can allow us to choose multiple types of flexible solar cells with the same compressive strain and amplitude.On the basis of those conclusions, this paper provides the compressive strain of flexible solar cells of two different substrates when the buckling amplitude reaches the height of 0.5cm, 1.0cm, 1.5cm, 2.0cm respectively and gives suggestions on optimal design of flexible solar cells with those specific amplitude. This paper further summarizes the empirical formula with minimum errors upon those results, which has been verified by von karman's classical theory, giving great convenience for the future work and practical application.