DESC0023602

Our goal is to develop a first-of-its-kind, commercial, model-based design tool to enable digital engineering of solar cells and modules. We will leverage and adapt Plato1 – an open-source2 software developed at Sandia National Laboratories to support multidisciplinary design, analysis, and optimization in high performance computing environments – to accelerate software development proposed here. Plato is enabled by Advanced Scientific Computing Research libraries (e.g., Trilinos, Kokkos, OpenMPI, Spack, Dakota, and many more) to facilitate automated workflows in high-performance computing environments. While Plato provides performance portable multiphysics simulation, design under uncertainty, and design for additive manufacturing capabilities, its use often requires a specialist. The absence of a sound support infrastructure also discourages potential commercial adopters from embracing Plato. To address this challenge, we propose an advanced platform Phaedo in this proposal. Phaedo would include a friendly web-based graphical user interface to facilitate problem setup, job submission, and visualization activities, including cloud deployment. We will also develop and document the forward and adjoint solvers needed to analyze the physics describing the behavior of solar cells and compute the total derivatives driving the optimization problem. Phaedo will then be employed to address cell efficiency, silver usage reduction, and metal contact reliability in solar cells – some of the most pressing engineering challenges in the solar community today. In particular, we will optimize the metal contact (also known as gridlines and fingers) design on solar cells to simultaneously maximize the current collection and therefore cell efficiency, minimize the usage of metal for manufacturing cost reduction, and minimize the stress in the metal contacts in response to external thermomechanical stress. Combined together, our approach would mitigate the stress-induced module degradation, such as cell cracks that typically propagate through the metal contacts, creating ‘dead areas’ in the solar cell. At the end of Phase I, we will demonstrate that the optimized metal contact design can, in fact, improve cell efficiency with a comparable or reduced usage of metal, and provide tolerance to stress that mimics inclement weather conditions. With a successful transition to Phase II, we will demonstrate the impact of our optimized metal contact design at the full-sized module level for its improved efficiency and reliability. We envision that Phaedo can be easily and broadly deployed in the PV community to increase performance, improve reliability, and prolong stability of photovoltaic modules used in the solar energy market. The global solar market was valued at $146B in 2021 and is expected to expand at a compound annual growth rate of 7.8% from 2022 to 2030. The push towards decarbonizing the electricity sector by 2035 and the scarcity of user-friendly, model-based design tools to optimize PV systems present a growth opportunity.