On-board photovoltaic (PV) energy generation is starting to be deployed in a variety of vehicles while still discussing its benefits. Integration requirements vary greatly for the different vehicles. Numerous types of PV cells and modules technologies are ready or under development to meet the challenges of this demanding sector. A comprehensive review of fast-changing vehicle-integrated photovoltaic (VIPV) products and lightweight PV cell and module technologies adapted for integration into electric vehicles (EVs) is presented in this paper. The number of VIPV projects and/or products is on a steady rise, especially car-based PV integration. Our analysis differentiates projects according to their development stage and technical solutions. The advantages and drawbacks of various PV cell and module technologies are discussed, in addition to recommendations for wide-scale deployment of the technologies.

Photovoltaic cells are produced as thin flat layers. They behave as a brittle and elastic material that fails at a given level of stress. Conforming cells into curved geometries will a priori induce both flexure and membrane stresses. In the present work, an analytical model is derived to predict both stress distributions and intensities in a mono‐crystalline pseudo‐square cell. Furthermore, a second model is derived to find the main stresses within fractions of cells. For conventional cell dimensions, solutions predict a transition from flexure to membrane dominated stresses for most conformations as curvature increases. As a consequence, near failure stresses are mainly determined by cells size and aspect ratio. In contrast, flexion is the main contribution in a small subset of the curvature space or for small curvatures. In the corresponding cases, stresses scale in proportion to cells thickness. As a consequence, cell size and/or shape is the main parameter to reduce internal stresses in most cases. In particular, the use of fractions of cells can substantially decrease membrane stresses and thus increase the maximum curvature. For instance, in a case study with M0 cells and curvature radii of a few meters, the highest predicted tensile stress is 45 . In such a case, the larger M12 format gives a prediction of . In contrast, thirds of cells give predictions of 25 and , respectively.