Dynamic kirigami structures for integrated solar tracking
By Aaron Lamoureux, Kyusang Lee, Matthew Shlian, Stephen R. Forrest, M. Shtein. Nature Communications, 2015
395 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Optical tracking is often combined with conventional flat panel solar cells to maximize electrical power generation over the course of a day. However, conventional trackers are complex and often require costly and cumbersome structural components to support system weight. Here we use kirigami (the art of paper cutting) to realize novel solar cells where tracking is integral to the structure at the substrate level. Specifically, an elegant cut pattern is made in thin-film gallium arsenide solar cells, which are then stretched to produce an array of tilted surface elements which can be controlled to within ±1°. We analyze the combined optical and mechanical properties of the tracking system, and demonstrate a mechanically robust system with optical tracking efficiencies matching conventional trackers. This design suggests a pathway towards enabling new applications for solar tracking, as well as inspiring a broader range of optoelectronic and mechanical devices. Tilting planar photovoltaic panels to track the position of the sun over the day can add to yearly energy consumption. Here, Lamoureaux et al.propose a kirigami solar cell structure with solar tracking integrated within the design, reducing cost, structural weight and bulk associated with conventional tracking.
Subfields: Aerospace Engineering, Civil and Structural Engineering, Mechanical Engineering
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9c54a6aba0294d15c24033032a98022759ab92ba
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In Mechanical Engineering
Citations in the corpus
- Adaptive Thermochromic Windows from Active Plasmonic Elastomers (2019, background): “The cut patterns endow materials with unusual mechanical properties such as the 2Dto-3D transformation,(9,10) predictive deformation,(7,11) and extensibility enhancement with negligible impact on conductance of a material,(12) thereby promoting the quick development in stretchable electronics,(6) se”
- Design of cut unit geometry in hierarchical kirigami-based auxetic metamaterials for high stretchability and compressibility (2017, background): “Very recently, kirigami (‘‘kiri’’ means cut), art of paper cutting, is becoming an emerging research frontier due to its broad potential applications in design of pluripotent materials [16, 17], stretchable and conformable electronics [18], stretchable energy storage devices [19], optical tracking i”