Mechanical Robustness Investigation of Organic Photovoltaics for Membrane Integrated Flexible Solar Cells

Flexible Photovoltaics (PV) are promising alternatives to established crystalline silicon technologies for their possible integration onto flexible and translucent architectural membrane materials like Ethylene tetrafluoroethylene (ETFE) and Polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE). This research proposes an experimental methodology based on coupled electrical characterization and uniaxial tensile tests to examine the mechanical robustness and the failure mechanism of a commercial organic photovoltaic module sample upon tensile loads.