PowerFilm, Inc. is a manufacturer of flexible thin film solar photovoltaic (PV) modules, or solar panels, based in Ames, Iowa and is a provider of solar products for industrial, consumer and military remote power applications. PowerFilm's amorphous silicon (a-Si) thin-film solar modules are both built into solar charger products as well as sold to OEM integrators. CEO Frank Jeffrey summarizes PowerFilm technology for the podcast interview The Naked Scientists "The principal part of the solar cell itself in our cells is amorphous a silicon, which has an extremely high absorption coefficient so that we can have extremely thin semiconducting material that will still absorb a good portion of light. That thin material, even though if it were thick like a crystalline wafer, it would break, in the same type structure when it’s thin enough becomes flexible and tends to bend rather than break. So, that’s the key part, our basic absorber layer that absorbs the solar energy is only say, 5,000 angstroms thick. So it’s quite thin and flexible and we put it on a thin film plastic substrate that is also flexible and adds mechanical support and strength to the solar component." Materials used in thin film absorb more light than traditional silicon cells and therefore can be made much thinner than crystalline cells (1 vs. 200 micrometres) More information...
According to PR-model, powerfilmsolar.com is ranked 1,854,040th in multilingual Wikipedia, in particular this website is ranked 1,026,955th in English Wikipedia.
The website is placed before manninghammasterplan.co.uk and after heiterbiswolkig-film.de in the BestRef global ranking of the most important sources of Wikipedia.
