Development and scale-up of very low-cost, light-weight, flexible solar cells

This Phase I SBIR will develop a scaleable ambient atmosphere manufacturing process to make durable flexible inorganic CuSnZnS thin film solar cells. The existing nanomaterial film manufacturing techniques to fabricate thin film solar cells are cumbersome and may not be that cost effective. The vacuum material deposition technique on the other hand, is capital intensive and has high operation cost. The solution to these identified problems could be SISOM"s proprietary"Streaming Process for Electroless Electrochemical Deposition"(SPEED) system. SPEED is an electroless aqueous based, low capital cost, low operational cost system capable of large area discrete or roll-to roll deposition of self-assembled nanomaterial based films directly on rigid or flexible substrates. The objectives of this Phase I research are to demonstrate a CuSnZnS solar cell manufactured on 10 cm x 10 cm area foil with at least 10 sub-cells with efficiency of at least 6% using SISOM"s SPEED system. Achieving these results in Phase I will open a path towards increasing the cell efficiency to 10% in Phase II. Sisom will scale the process up to 12"web roll-to-roll production of CuSnZnS solar cells. The results of Phase II will move Sisom closer to commercializing thin film CuSnZnS solar cells.