Description
The objective of this activity is to develop, manufacture and test new solar cells with new structures, new processes that will increase the throughput.Targeted Improvements: Doubling the production throughput by the introduction of innovative processes with anew solar cell designDescription: Currently the demand of highly efficient solar cells is exceeding the supply and requires to bemuch more competitive. Simplified manufacturing processes and innovative solar cell designs are needed to reduce complexity and shorten manufacturing time. This asks for innovative technologies and cell designs that allow for a much higher throughput, reducing bottleneck processes, downtimes of machines, etc. Today, such solar cell for large constellation applications is only available outside ESA member states. This activity will perform trade-offs to satisfy system needs in terms of power and radiation stability but allows for a much shorter development and manufacturing time. This could be achieved by increasing the cell growth rate in the reactor but also by reducing the number of junctions in the device. This, of course, has an impact on the cell efficiency but is compensated by a reduction in complexity and by a much faster delivery of required solar cells. An increase of production if expressed in kW/yearof around 50% is considered feasible by implementing innovative processes that target significant increase in throughput by at the same time a moderate and acceptable drop in performance.. New solar cell engineering models, with new structures, and that could include spin-in of terrestrial solar cell processes will be designed, manufactured and tested to validate the new processes and new structures.Procurement Policy: C(1) = Activity restricted to non-prime contractors (incl. SMEs). For additional information please go to:http://www.esa.int/About_Us/Business_with_ESA/Small_and_Medium_Sized_En….