An Optimization-Based Design Ecosystem Targeting Performance, Reliability, and Stability of Photovoltaic Modules in Solar Energy Market

Our goal is to develop a first-of-its-kind, commercial, model-based design tool to enable digital engineering of solar cells and modules. We will leverage and adapt Plato1 ľ an open-source2 software developed at Sandia National Laboratories to support multidisciplinary design, analysis, and optimization (MDAO) in high performance computing (HPC) environments ľ to accelerate software development proposed here. Plato is enabled by ASCR libraries (e.g., Trilinos, Kokkos, OpenMPI, Spack, Dakota, etc.) to facilitate automated MDAO workflows in HPC environments. While Plato provides performance portable multiphysics simulation, design under uncertainty, and design for additive manufacturing capabilities, its use often requires a specialist. The absence of a sound support infrastructure also discourages potential commercial adopters from embracing Plato. To address this challenge, we propose an advanced platform Phaedo in this proposal. The vision for Phaedo is to create a performance portable electro-thermo-mechanical finite element solver capable of simulating reliability of solar PV systems. Automatic differentiation will be employed to facilitate computation of Jacobians and partial derivatives for analysis and simulation-driven optimization with ease. Distributed memory parallel programing models will be implemented to accelerate simulation turnaround. By combining performance portable and distributed memory parallel programming models, the multiphysics solver will be able to optimally perform reliability calculations across a variety of computational environments. The team will work with Trina Solar to validate the reliability results produced by the multiphysics solver. Once the multiphysics solver has been validated with the data provided by Trina Solar, Phaedo will be employed to address cell efficiency, silver usage reduction, and metal contact reliability ľ some of the most pressing engineering challenges in the PV community today. We will optimize the metal contact (also known as gridlines) design on solar cells to simultaneously maximize the current collection and therefore cell efficiency, minimize the usage of metal for manufacturing cost reduction, and minimize the stress in the metal contacts in response to external thermomechanical stress. Our simulation-driven design optimization approach would mitigate the stress-induced module degradation, such as cell cracks that typically propagate through the metal contacts, creating Ĺdead areasĺ in the solar cell. The team will also apply Phaedo to design challenges relevant to Trina Solar as our customer. During Phase I, we made progress with shape optimization to anticipate improved efficiency and reduced metal usage. We also confirmed with experiment that Level Set Method is crucial in topological optimization to represent accurate material properties. At the end of Phase II, we will (1) deliver a validated multiphysics solver capable of simulating reliability of solar PV systems and (2) demonstrate at the full-sized module level that the optimized metal contact design produced by Phaedo can, in fact, improve cell/module efficiency with a comparable or reduced usage of metal, and provide tolerance to stress that mimics inclement weather elements. With Phase III and beyond, we envision that Phaedo can be easily and broadly deployed in the PV community to increase performance, improve reliability, and prolong stability of photovoltaic modules used in the solar energy market.