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Substrate-free flexible thin film solar cells by graphene-mediated peel-off technology

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Abstract

Flexible electronics are currently one of the most important developing trends, which is normally fabricated and supported on external flexible substrates. In this work, we experimentally realized a facile graphene-mediated peel-off technology for the substrate-free flexible hydrogenated amorphous silicon (a-Si:H) thin film solar cell. The a-Si:H solar cells were firstly grown on high thermal tolerance rigid SiO2/Si substrates with graphene interlayers and then were facilely peeled off from the graphene/SiO2/Si substrate with high fidelity. The density functional theory calculations verify the fact that sandwiching the graphene sheet weakens the interaction between the solar device and SiO2/Si substrate with a 61% exfoliation energy drop. Subsequently, a microstructured polyethylene terephthalate film was designed as the window layer of the substrate-free a-Si:H device to promote the broadband and omnidirectional enhanced performance of the flexible device, as well as the mechanical strength. Our proposed graphene-mediated peel-off process can be extended to fabricate other light weight electronics and optoelectronic devices (especially for devices needed to be obtained under high temperature) and can potentially be developed into large-scale manufacturing in the future as well.

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The authors declare that materials described in the manuscript, including all relevant raw data, will be freely available to any scientist wishing to use them for non-commercial purposes without breaching participant confidentiality.

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Acknowledgements

This work was financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (61622407, 21973006, 51861135101), Science and Technology Commission of Shanghai Municipality (19ZR1479100), the Youth Innovation Promotion Association, Chinese Academy of Sciences (2019287).

Funding

This work was financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (61622407, 21973006, 51861135101), Science and Technology Commission of Shanghai Municipality (19ZR1479100), the Youth Innovation Promotion Association, Chinese Academy of Sciences (2019287).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Materials Science and Engineering, Shanghai University, Shanghai, 200444, China

    Jingye Li & Yigang Chen

  2. CAS Key Lab of Low-Carbon Conversion Science and Engineering, Shanghai Advanced Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 99 Haike Road, Zhangjiang Hi-Tech Park, Pudong, Shanghai, 201210, China

    Jingye Li, Chi Zhang, Dongdong Li, Xiaohong Fang, Yinyue Lin & Min Yin

  3. College of Chemistry, Key Laboratory of Theoretical & Computational Photochemistry of Ministry of Education, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, 100875, China

    Lu Qiao & Run Long

  4. Jinneng Clean Energy Technology Ltd, 533 Guang’an Street, Jinzhong, 030600, China

    Liyou Yang

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  1. Jingye Li
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Contributions

Conceptualization: CZ and DL. Data curation: JL. Formal analysis: JL, MY, and YC. Funding acquisition: MY,RL, and Dl. Investigation: JL and CZ. Methodology: CZ and XF. Project administration: MY and YC. Resources: MY, LY, and DL. Software: LQ and RL. Supervision: MY and YC. Validation: YL. Visualization: JL and YL. Writing, original draft: JL and MY. Writing, review and editing: DL and YC.

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Correspondence to Yigang Chen or Min Yin.

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Li, J., Zhang, C., Li, D. et al. Substrate-free flexible thin film solar cells by graphene-mediated peel-off technology. J Mater Sci: Mater Electron 31, 10279–10287 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10854-020-03574-6

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