The Design and Development of Woven Textile Solar Panels

Abstract

Over the past few years, alternative power supplies to either supplement or replace batteries for electronic textile and wearable applications have been sought, with the development of wearable solar energy harvesting systems gaining significant interest. In a previous publication the authors reported a novel concept to craft a yarn capable of harvesting solar energy by embedding miniature solar cells within the fibers of a yarn (solar electronic yarns). The aim of this publication is to report the development of a large-area textile solar panel. This study first characterized the solar electronic yarns, and then analyzed the solar electronic yarns once woven into double cloth woven textiles; as part of this study, the effect of different numbers of covering warp yarns on the performance of the embedded solar cells was explored. Finally, a larger woven textile solar panel (510 mm × 270 mm) was constructed and tested under different light intensities. It was observed that a PMAX = 335.3 ± 22.4 mW of energy could be harvested on a sunny day (under 99,000 lux lighting conditions).

Smart Textiles: A Review and Bibliometric Mapping

“…Researchers are exploring new sustainable and environmentally friendly materials, green manufacturing methods, end-of-the-life processes, and standardized sustainability assessment methods, such as life cycle analysis, recyclability, and biodegradability [23,161,162]. Second, numerous positive contributions of smart textiles to sustainability are highlighted in the following areas [163]: environmental monitoring (temperature and humidity sensors, gas sensors) [164][165][166]; fresh water purification and harvesting (filtering, mist collection, collection by coalescence or mechanical squeezing) [167][168][169]; personal protection (warming, cooling, electromagnetic protection, EMI shielding, protection against UV radiation, toxic substances and microorganisms) [35,37,138,[170][171][172][173]; power supply on the body with energy harvesting and storage (triboelectric nanogenerators [174][175][176][177][178][179][180], including thermoelectric generators [134,181,182], photovoltaic textiles [183][184][185], bio-physicochemical energy harvesting [186], textiles with perovskite solar cells and other perovskite materials [187,188], dry batteries and flexible electrodes [189][190][191][192], and wearable all-in-one power sources that integrate energy harvesting and storage capability into one textile…”