Tunable Photovoltaics: Adapting Solar Cell Technologies to Versatile Applications

Abstract

Solar photovoltaics (PV) offer viable and sustainable solutions to satisfy the growing energy demand and to meet the pressing climate targets. The deployment of conventional PV technologies is one of the major contributors of the ongoing energy transition in electricity power sector. However, the diversity of PV paradigms can open different opportunities for supplying modern systems in a wide range of terrestrial, marine, and aerospace applications. Such ubiquitous and versatile applications necessitate the development of PV technologies with customized design capabilities. This involves multifunctional characteristics such as aesthetic appearance, visual comfort, and heat insulation. To enable on-demand adaptation to the requirements of distributed applications, tunable solar cells (SC) feature exceptional degrees of freedom in the manipulation of their intrinsic properties via adjusted materials engineering. The pertinent tuning abilities include but are not limited to bandgap energy, transparency, color, and thermal management. In this review, the main principles of different tuning approaches are specified and an overview of relevant concepts of tunable SC technologies is presented. Then, the recent integrations of cutting-edge tunable PV adapted to versatile applications are systematically summarized. In addition, current challenges and insightful perspectives into potential future opportunities for omnipresent tunable PV are discussed.