Stress tolerance of lightweight glass-free PV modules for vehicle integration

Electric vehicles (EVs) currently dominate the sales in the automotive market. A big leap in this market can be made by developing a photovoltaic product that can be integrated to an EV, as it can boost the driving range of the EV while reducing the charging frequency. Such vehicle-integrated photovoltaic (VIPV) products are already successfully demonstrated, but they are usually made with glass as a front sheet - making them bulky and limiting their use to the car roofs due to safety reasons. The contemporary focus of the research in the field of VIPV is on developing a product that is lightweight (LW) and easily integrable into the complex shapes of an EV. Therefore, in this work, we present our initial findings on a novel architecture for LW VIPV modules employing polycarbonate (PC) as a front sheet. The mechanical behaviour of the LW module under bending is successfully simulated using finite elements (FE) modelling to predict the fracture of the solar cells, which can then be used as a predictive tool to check the maximal load on the PV body of an EV before cracking the c-Si solar cells. We demonstrate that a change in the temperature of the PC-based LW modules can modify the interspacing between the cells and thus create stress on the connectors. The dog-bone connectors are found to allow almost unconstrained movement of the cells in the module when subjected to variation of temperature. The cell movements may result in mechanical fatigue of the interconnection, which can ultimately result in disconnection of the cells. Initial performance of the dog-bone connectors is investigated by applying mechanical fatigue experiments, which demonstrate that the special geometry of the dog-bone connector could endure a greater number of thermal cycles than a simple prismatic shape would.