(February 23) High-Performance, Flexible Solar Energy Harvesting Devices Enabled by Nanophotonic Management

Recently, there have been great efforts to develop alternative green energy sources that can replace current limited energy sources comprising carbon-based materials. As such alternatives, photovoltaic cells of solar energy harvesting devices have been of great attention owing to unlimited and accessible source energy, eco-friendly power conversion process, in conjunction with facile energy storage. Despite such favorable characteristics, photovoltaic cells could not be fully universal as the cost of energy production was relatively higher than other energy sources. Hence, improving the solar-to-electric power conversion efficiency, together with reducing the fabrication cost, has been a major objective in the photovoltaic research field. Meanwhile, attempts to develop attractive classes of photovoltaic cells, such as flexible/wearable solar cells, began to increase in order to overcome the limitations (i.e., heavy and rigid modules) of typical photovoltaic cells. In this regard, this talk presents the recent studies of developing low-cost, high-performance, flexible semiconductor solar cells that were enabled with transfer-printing fabrication technique and nanophotonic management. The findings of these studies address many challenges of the next-generation photovoltaic systems.