Thin crystalline silicon solar photovoltaics holds great potential for
reducing the module price by material saving and increasing the efficiency by
reduced bulk recombination loss. However, the module efficiency decreases
rather sensitively as the module temperature rises under sunlight. Effective,
inexpensive approach to cooling modules would accelerate large-scale market
adoption of thin crystalline silicon photovoltaics. For effective cooling, we
exploit high flexibility of single-crystalline thin silicon films to create
wavy solar cells. These wavy cells possess larger surface area than
conventional flat cells, while occupying the same projected area. We
experimentally demonstrate that the temperature of thin wavy crystalline
silicon solar cells under the sunlight can be significantly reduced by
increased convective cooling due to their large surface area. The substantial
efficiency gain, achieved by the effective heat removal, points to
high-performance thin crystalline silicon photovoltaic systems that are
radically different in configuration from conventional systems.Comment: 33 pages, 17 figure