Innovative flexible lightweight thin-film power generation and storage for space applications

ITN Energy Systems and Global Solar Energy (GSE), LLC, are developing innovative power solutions for future spacecraft. Our flexible copper-indium-gallium-selenium (CIGS) photovoltaic material shows significant promise towards volume and weight reduction, using innovative stowage and deployment technologies, and has tremendous promise for cost reduction when teamed with monolithic integration to reduce touch labor. Rollout or foldout array designs using flexible CIGS lend themselves to very small stowage volume, which are directly applicable to the trend towards microsatellite technologies. Specific power of the CIGS PV blanket can be over 1000 W/kg and with array specific power (including structure) 100-200 W/kg. Further development with multi-junction CIGS devices can provide array specific power of 200-300 W/kg. Other developments at ITN and GSE include an extremely long-lived solid-state flexible thin-film battery with less sensitivity to temperature that could be integrated with the solar array for localized power generation and storage. These batteries have demonstrated over 40000 charge cycles to 100% depth of discharge, and have a virtually flat discharge behavior that holds great attraction to system designers. Utilizing this concept, we have been developing a flexible integrated power pack (FIPP) approach that combines power generation, management and storage onto a single component for space applications. In this paper, we describe concepts utilizing flexible power generation, management, and storage for future space missions, and the state of development of these flexible technologies