Solar Engineered For Mobility

Silicon solar cells sit at the top of the efficiency curve, but in practice they are mechanically fragile. A monocrystalline cell is only a fraction of a millimetre thick; bending, vibration, point loads, and thermal movement all create microcracks that permanently reduce output.

Most of that damage is invisible. Under electroluminescence imaging, cells reveal dark areas, hairline fractures, and inactive regions that don’t show up in normal light. Because cells are wired in series, a single compromised cell can throttle the performance of the entire panel and accelerate long-term degradation.

Rigid solar panels, like the ones you see on rooftops, keep the cells safe because the cells sit behind thick glass inside a metal frame. That is great for houses, but it makes the panels heavy, chunky, and hard to use in places where space, shape, or design actually matter, like vehicles and vessels.

Flexible panels fix that by being lighter and thinner. The problem is that most of them still use the same basic construction. The cells are glued between layers of plastic films such as EVA or ETFE. Those films protect from rain and sun, but they are not built to handle bending, pressure, footsteps, or constant movement. The electronics have improved, the physical structure has not.