Printable nanostructured silicon solar cells for high-performance, large-area flexible photovoltaics

Nanostructured forms of crystalline silicon represent an attractive materials building block for photovoltaics due to their potential benefits to significantly reduce the consumption of active materials, relax the requirement of materials purity for high performance, and hence achieve greatly improved levelized cost of energy. Despite successful demonstrations for their concepts over the past decade, however, the practical application of nanostructured silicon solar cells for large-scale implementation has been hampered by many existing challenges associated with the consumption of the entire wafer or expensive source materials, difficulties to precisely control materials properties and doping characteristics, or restrictions on substrate materials and scalability. Here we present a highly integrable materials platform of nanostructured silicon solar cells that can overcome these limitations. Ultrathin silicon solar microcells integrated with engineered photonic nanostructures are fabricated directly from wafer-based source materials in configurations that can lower the materials cost and can be compatible with deterministic assembly procedures to allow programmable, large-scale distribution, unlimited choices of module substrates, as well as lightweight, mechanically compliant constructions. Systematic studies on optical and electrical properties, photovoltaic performance in experiments, as well as numerical modeling elucidate important design rules for nanoscale photon management with ultrathin, nanostructured silicon solar cells and their interconnected, mechanically flexible modules, where we demonstrate 12.4% solar-to-electric energy conversion efficiency for printed ultrathin (∼ 8 μm) nanostructured silicon solar cells when configured with near-optimal designs of rear-surface nanoposts, antireflection coating, and back-surface reflector.