Advanced Photovoltaic Arrays for Solar Concentrators and Inflatable Antennas

Membrane concentrators have a low specific mass, high packaging efficiency and canbe deployed in space to provide large amounts of collected energy. SRS has recentlydemonstrated all of the key elements of a concentrator for a near term spaceexperiment. Addition of recently invented technologies of polyimide flexible PVcells to elements of the collector system offers to provide power to the spacecraftbus thereby using the collector aperture as power generation sources. The proposedeffort will address key issues of flexible PV arrays. The traditional cover glassused to reject thermal loads will be replaced with a transparent polyimide with highemissive thermal property. The developed cell will then be applied to the supporttorus and of the membrane to provide power to the satellite bus. Innovations indoubly cast PV arrays will also be addressed to research the addition of the cellsinto the actual reflective membrane surface.Research is currently being done by a number of scientists within DoD and industry toincrease the efficiency of flexible thin film PV cells from the 3-8% to the 10+% range.The development of increased efficiency flexible membrane cells could replace thetraditionally accepted composite rigid panel mounted cells in the near future. Inaddition a number of potential commercial applications could benefit from thetechnology like the PV skins of long duration UAV's.