Novel, High-Efficiency, Light-weight, Flexible Solar Cells as Electrical Power Generation Source

MicroLink Devices proposes to integrate its high-efficiency, lightweight, and flexible solar sheets to the Puma UAS platform to significantly extend the flight endurance of the aircraft. The Navy has a growing fleet of small unmanned aerial system (UAS) vehicles that enable tactical intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities not possible before, and a need to extended mission lengths of these battery-powered platforms is apparent. MicroLink’s inverted metamorphic (IMM) multi-junction epitaxial lift-off (ELO) solar cell technology is the basis for manufacturing an advanced thin-film solar sheet technology that can produce enough power to sustain flight. MicroLink will apply volume production techniques to solar cell and module manufacture for scale up and cost reduction. This will enable the production of cells with >30% AM1.5 efficiency in a volume production environment and demonstrate a pathway of reducing cell cost to <$100/Watt. Flexible solar cell array modules composed of 20 cm2-sized cells will be manufactured and integrated into the wing of the UAS platform in a method that can be applied to other battery-powered UAS platforms. The resulting solar wing will then be flight tested on the UAS vehicle.